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One of the signs that you’re in a good coffee shop is if they serve their milk-based espresso drinks with an artful rosetta (floral pattern) on top. This is referred to as Latte art. At first glance, it may appear to be an offhand flourish by the barista – similar to a bartender flipping a bottle in the air before pouring a drink – but it is actually much more than that.

Latte art is a representation of the care and expertise that went into creating your drink: a good quality coffee bean; the ideal grind in order to pull an espresso with the right amount of crema (the oily brownish foam that sits on top of a good shot of espresso); milk that has been steamed just right to have a micro-foam consistency (uniform small bubbles throughout); and, of course, the perfect pour to blend the milk and espresso just right until a flower, heart, or other artful creation emerges on top.

While we sit back and enjoy today’s coffee – a Brazil Yellow Bourbon Latte (amazing bitter cocoa flavors, is this a latte or a hot chocolate?!?) – let’s consider how an optimally performing Drupal site compares to the creation of latte art.

There are many factors that contribute to a high performance Drupal site. For starters, we can look at factors such as code quality, the use of caches where possible, database configuration, and front-end caching. For a Drupal site to perform at its best, all of these components must be done well. Even a small misconfiguration or a bit of buggy code can be enough to slow a site to a crawl, especially when serving a large amount of traffic. The same can be said for latte art: if the coffee beans aren’t fresh enough to produce crema, or the milk isn’t foamed properly, or the pour of the milk isn’t done with the correct technique, the result will be an ordinary-looking – and possibly poor-tasting – drink.