The PDA Stack

The PDA stack is our content management and deployment infrastructure, built around Plone as the application core with a purpose-built containerization and build layer underneath. Plone provides our content management system, handling editorial workflows, asset management, and dynamic content delivery through a mature, Python-based platform. It's the user-facing layer where content editors and administrators interact with the system, and it powers our public-facing content APIs and web interfaces.

Debian serves as our primary host operating system and runtime environment, chosen for its stability, long-term support cycles, and extensive package ecosystem. We run our Plone instances on Debian servers in production, where its predictable release schedule and security patching cadence align with our operational requirements. Debian's comprehensive tooling also supports our local development workflows and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring consistency between development and production environments.

Alpine rounds out the stack as our build and packaging layer, specifically through its package build system. We use Alpine's build scripts and package infrastructure to create optimized, lightweight base images and pre-compiled dependencies that we can distribute across our Debian hosts. This decoupling allows us to maintain reproducible builds and streamlined deployments—Alpine gives us fast, deterministic package compilation in isolated environments, while Debian handles the actual runtime where Plone serves content at scale.