If e-Commerce wants to grow and gain new markets, it is natural to take good care of the server infrastructure on which the shop is located. This need i perfectly understood by Strefa Tenisa , which at the end of 2016 decided to switch from a standard server solution to cloud computing.
About the project
Task
StrefaTenisa.com.pl due to its dynamic growth (in September 2016 it launched its new Strefa Squasha brand), entrusted us with the task of optimizing their server infrastructure, which had to meet the following requirements:
- reliability
- efficiency
- scalability
The need to reorganize servers has been born of the fact of launching a new brand, but also in response to the ever-growing number of e-Commerce customers, which generates periodically high volumes of traffic on the store (eg, during a sale). As the Strefa Tenisa puts a strong emphasis on e-business development and customer satisfaction, our task was to organize the infrastructure so that additional server load would not adversely affect the functioning of the store.
Challenges
Classic server infrastructure The biggest challenge was to reorganize and propose a new hosting strategy for the client. So far, the store application has used the standard solution, one physical server machine.
This stopped being right at the moment when the customer had decided on dynamic development of their business. The classic server managed well with organic and slow growth in store traffic (it had enough power to handle such growth), but already in the case of various promotional actions that resulted in the emergence of a large number of customers in a short time, we had to opt for more flexible And a scalable solution.
Of course, we could choose to go to a more powerful machine or strengthen the infrastructure with a few traditional servers, supported by a service redundancy system, and a mechanism for scattering traffic between machines. The problem was that this strategy would only remove the problem in time. Both solutions in a relatively short time would also be insufficient and they would not have the resources to properly maintain the store. We wanted to avoid this and that is why we offered the customer a completely different approach.
Server in the cloud In the new deal we set up servers on the Oktawave cloud We decided for their solution for two reasons.
Flexibility of solution
The OktaWave administrator panel has many tools to facilitate and automate even complex administrative tasks, and allows you to build almost any custom server infrastructure. The operator has the ability to use default server instance templates or create custom ones based on standard distributions, Debian.
Autoscaler
This is a tool that allows us to automatically adjust the resources of specific servers, depending on the volume of traffic on the store. Autoscaler constantly monitors server loads and increases their computing power and the amount of available memory. This works without restarting the machine.
On the other hand, when you need to reduce resources, you have the ability to set such a process at a particular time, such as at night, and the redundancy of individual components of the infrastructure allows you to restart individual machines imperceptibly for the customer (Web site user).
New server infrastructure of Strefa Tenisa In a very simplistic way: online store, substantially its application, has been scattered into seven virtual machines within the OktaWave infrastructure.
- The first element of the infrastructure is the gateway. It's a kind of haproxy based router, which, depending on your needs, available resources, and preferences, scatters traffic around the web servers.
- The key component of the optimization was scattering traffic to three virtual servers responsible for serving web pages. There are a lot of them because they are responsible for the proper functioning of the Strefa Tenisa during the most hot promotions, which are drawing numerous clients to the store. The action of this element is currently supported by the aforementioned autoscaler.
- The fourth web server is dedicated only to photos. Serving static files requires a different configuration than the web server responsible for dynamically generating pages. Even if for some reason it ceases to function, the remaining three servers will undertake this task.
- The database server is on a separate machine that has been optimized for this specific task. It has fast disks (Tier 3) and memory so that the database does not need to compete with other services. This resulted in, even in the moments of conducting the most intensive promotional activities of the store, the database server responded to inquiries without any downtime. Within this element we also used an autoscaler, but in this case the machine has the ability to only raise the server parameters without reducing them. Due to the lack of this mechanism, we wanted to have complete control over the database reboots, and consequently, its availability when it generates a higher load than usual. Virtual servers responsible for the operation of the shop do not feel this phenomenon and e-Commerce functions without any problems.
- NFS / memcache server, is a common file resource for web servers. Theoretically, memcache, which is used by web servers, should be on the same machines as Apache from PHP, but by performing performance tests, it turns out to be of minimal importance. As a result, we were able to carry out the entire modernization with less financial cost to the customer.
End Result
The transition to cloud computing involves three main benefits for the Strefa Tenisa.
- We are much more capable to identify elements that are the most burdensome for e-Commerce infrastructure. We can direct movement of the customers in shop between machines and determine which types of server queries consume the most resources, such as running a "product card" page from one particular web server, and investigating the load generated by this store element.
- We dynamically react at the moments of the largest traffic and quickly allocate the necessary resources to the proper operation of the store. Before moving the server, the sudden growth of traffic although by several times, was a problem. Now we are not afraid of growth even by several dozens or hundreds of times. We are talking about the number of people browsing the store at one time - see Google Analytics, the "Live" section.
- We can comfortably do the administrative task on the server, because now we don’t need to shut down the whole store, just one of virtual machines. Thanks to that clients of Strefa Tenisa don’t hit the break in the store access.
