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Online Website Builder For a Software Company

How rewiring the architecture of a website builder helped a software company boost the system performance under high load and maintain 99,95% availability.

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Business needs

Online website builder Saitodrom required new software and hardware architecture to support growth requirements. Old platform couldn’t handle increased number of users, websites and huge traffic.

New platform should ensure:

High performance under high load

Easy-to-Scale solution to support further growth

High availability (99,95% SLA)

Other crucial requirement included preserving the core architecture based on Java.

Challenge

The old platform was single host oriented and reached its maximum capacity. The new platform should be based on a distributed architecture to meet load requirements and should be highly available with downtimes avoidance.

The main challenges:

Enable distributed architecture preserving the core

Build highly available platform

Avoid downtimes during updates and unexpected failures

Solution

Proxmox High Availability Cluster

Proxmox Cluster is built on 3 physical hosts and ensures high availability functioning of virtual
machines. If the physical host fails the virtual machines running on it are automatically started on one of the remaining cluster nodes

Highly Available Storage

Highly available shared storage is built on 2 physical hosts using DRBD, heartbeat and NFS technologies. Only one host acts as an active storage providing read/write access to data that is replicated to the second passive host by using DRBD. If the active host fails it is detected by hearbeat and access to the storage is switched to passive host transparently

Highly Available Database

Highly available database is organized by using two physical hosts and MySQL cluster with replication. Interaction with database is performed through HAProxy that provides access to and checks availability of the master database. If the master database fails HAProxy automatically switches to the second database

Application Cluster

To support increasing number of users instinctools has built application cluster based on Nginx load balancer and Tomcat web servers. Nginx is used as a high performance reverse proxy, HTTP cache and load balancer. It is based on event-driven, asynchronous architecture that makes it fast, lightweight and robust under high load

The following features of Tomcat Cluster help to avoid downtime:

Session In Memory Replication
By using in memory replication session information is synchronized across cluster nodes allowing users to continue work transparently even if one of the web servers fails
Parallel Deployment
Effective zero-downtime solution for deploying new version of the system. Users with active sessions can continue to use the old version and new users will be routed to the new one

To ensure overall high availability of the system:

Zabbix monitoring system is used to monitor the system, detect failures and apply automatic recovery

Results

New scalable and fault-tolerant platform allowed the customer to:

serve growing demands (new users, websites)
increase overall performance (especially under high load)
ensure near-zero downtime (essential for providing high-quality services)

Hardware infrastructure was implemented by using Hetzner hosting provider.

Consolidated Content Pool For a Venture Capital Company

How adopting a robust content pool with advanced content reuse mechanisms empowered a venture capital company to publish their diverse content from a single source across various target media simultaneously.

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*instinctools delivered a consolidated content pool to Burda Digital Systems based on single-source principles. Using the new generation of the GateOne Framework an allpurpose, future-proof platform for integration, standardization and distribution of information has been created.

Challenge

Hubert Burda Media ranks among the pioneers implementing cross-media strategies and consequently counts on connecting online and print media in order to profit from integrated information, synchronized multimedia offerings and clustered journalistic competency.

Such strategies rquire robust and flexible solutions ensuring cross-company storage and distribution of contents.

Approach

To put this strategy to action Burda Digital Systems decided for an Information Management solution provided by *instinctools, which consolidates data of diverse, customer specific software applications in a single data base without changing data structure or content inside the source systems.

This solution developed by *instinctools, an IT company based in Stuttgart, takes care of standarizationand integration of several media formats and offers a variety of interfaces for further distribution out of the consolidated content pool.

The system is suited for complex data integration and persues the principle of single-source publishing. This means publishing contents from a single source to various target media in different context. The same media element can simultaneously be used in online portals and printed magazines.

The system is freely expandable. Synchronisation and conversion interfaces facilitate flexible connection of additional data sources.

Technology

The project for Burda Digital Systems has been implemented by means of the latest generation of the GateOne framework. The modular application infrastructure of GateOne makes it a flexible, powerful and future-oriented platform for individual solutions.

Advantages

Consolidated data

Reuse

Fast reaction to new customers

Channel selection

Enhancements possible

No change in existing systems

New exports without programming

Supplying actual content to the portal TV Today (www.tvtoday.de) is the first mission for this solution. It is individually selected and prepared.

Thanks to its comfortable user interface content packages can easily and efficiently be defined. New customers can be served on the spot as development of specific extract- and conversion programs are rendered unnecessary. Delivery of information can be managed manually, on-demand or automated by scheduler.

Legacy System Modernization For an Environmental Company

How migrating from no longer supported VB6 to Java provided an environmental company with an app that seamlessly handles multiple customer requests at a time.

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Challenge

Customers turned to us with the following problems:

They needed a convenient way to build complex queries in the database.
There were some performance problems with the client’s site. The system was running slowly in the case of multiple requests.
Customers needed to restrict access to the application using a White IP List where access would be allowed only to certain IP addresses.
There was a need to synchronize data with other databases.
It was necessary to construct graphs based on the processed data (e.g., “Number of bags per hour,” “Number of shipments per hour,” etc.).
Customers needed improvement of TimeSlot overview and scheduling. It was necessary to develop an electronic schedule (organizer) enabling the reserving of time for unloading and servicing of trucks with bottles.
They needed the ability to obtain additional user data from LDAP.

Solution

The problem was solved in the following way:

To enable easy construction of complex queries in the database, we suggested and implemented the use of Querydsl.
We optimized and used cache data to solve the performance problem and improve the operation speed when there are multiple requests.
To restrict access to the application, we implemented Interceptor for requests intercepting and filtering (White IP List and Whitelist for paths).
We implemented a file manager based on Qdrive.
To construct graphs on the basis of processed data, we used an additional module of chart.js.
We developed a data model and implemented basic logic for CRUD operations in accordance with business requirements (frontend and backend sides).

We developed Time Slots Overview – an electronic schedule (organizer) to reserve the unloading time of the machine with bottles, featuring marking of fields “reserved time” / “available for reservation time” / “unavailable for reservation time” by different colors. The mechanism takes into account the overlap of reserved periods, and automatically suggests the nearest free time, if the time the customer has chosen for reservation is already taken. After reservation, the customer can view its details at any time.
We created jobs or scheduling tasks for processing the scheduled data.
We developed a variety of services for the system, for example, MailService – a shared service to send e-mails.