Overview

During the Internet boom there was a lack of sophisticated, cost effective tools and frameworks to scale and monitor web related services. Nowadays, while the tools have progressed, so too have user expectations with respect to UI richness, performance and application availability. With the current economic state these raised expectations have driven organization to deploy cost conscious solutions based upon what you really need while relying on other people’s work where possible. This brings open source technologies to the forefront and its ability to support both scalable and optimized web 2.0 service infrastructure cost effectively.

Client Objective

A premium online advertising community and content management service software provider needed the ability to scale multiple sites and services for there expanding affiliate network. The organization needed to meet the following business requirements.

1. Meet business service SLA’s for up time and performance.
2. Provide efficient deployment of new services reliably.
3. Provide the ability to have numerous development and QA environments with a  cost effective price point.
4. Provide a solution withing budget constraints.

Client Solution

The technical solutions was able to meet the business requirements  utilizing numerous open source technologies. The following describes the finalized solution.

Amazons EC2 service provided an ideal hosting platform to meet several of the business requirements. The on demand pay as you use service was utilized for the numerous development and testing environments and was the most cost effective solution to mange numerous client white label environments. All source code is managed with CVS as well.

To meet business SLA and performance objectives a number of open source  technologies where utilized to include nagios, mrtg and splunk. This combination provided an effective application availability monitoring, network utilization and performance metrics for production co location servers. Capistrano and Puppet are  used for configuration, application deployment  and server management of the LAMP based stack

Ultimately this organization was able to meet all their business objectives within budget utilizing sphisticated open source tools and on demand cloud infrastructure.