Behind The Scenes: Part 1 – Insights Into How ShopLocal Manages Infrastructure

Posted on 11 June 2009 by Patrick FlanaganNo Comments

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For this first of few behind the scenes looks, we will be looking at a few of the main tools and services that the ShopLocal infrastructure team uses to ensure high availability and performance of all the various public web applications / sites that ShopLocal hosts.

The goal of this series is to give clients & partners a better, more complete understanding of all the areas that ShopLocal provides value across.  In other words, for every dollar of client / partner revenue that comes in, some portion of that dollar goes to fund the world-class infrastructure that ShopLocal brings to all clients / partners.  The internal team takes great pride in this set of systems, as it is not some low-budget, “server room in the office closet type start-up data center”, loosely managed, afterthought.  Rather it is a best-of breed solution that is leveraging partnerships with the leaders in each respective field.

At a summary level this post will examine how ShopLocal uses:

1. Keynote - An external, 3rd party availability and performance monitoring that is done from an end user perspective
2. Akamai - One of the largest and most powerful content distribution networks (CDN) that ShopLocal heavily uses to cache and distribute web site content
3. Rackspace - A top leader in dedicated, fully-supported web hosting / data center that also provides a powerful set of server health monitoring and remote admin controls

Keynote - Performance and Availability

• By being a 3rd party, this brings real time objectivity to any client / partner feedback and reported issues
• Configured as a proactive monitoring solution that has many levels of alerts and escalation setup to warn internal team members of potential and/or real issues
• Keynote offers the broadest and most representative set of test infrastructure which help cast the “net” as wide as possible. OS, browser type, network location, type of ISP, type of connection, geography, etc are all tested simultaneously
• Global measurement network across multiple locations and backbones gives a very broad perspective
• 2400+ measurement computers and mobile devices in 240 locations provide extensive reach and depth to measurements
• Accurate, realistic view of the end user experience. This is the most important point.  Everything Keynote does is done from this user perspective. Most IT infrastructures have plenty of internal, non-user perspective monitors of server health, performance, uptime etc from WITHIN their data center / firewall.  But these really only provide a very limited and often false picture of what true everyday users experience

This is a real (blinded to protect the identity of the eight ShopLocal SmartCircular retail clients) sample daily level (so hourly) report from Keynote that measures site performance across on average around ~950 data points per retailer

Akamai – EdgePlatform Content Distribution Network (CDN)

• Extensively used by ShopLocal , especially on all of the highest traffic sites and web applications
• Highly custom content synchronization process has bee built out to ensure the timely scheduling, caching, flushing and release of web content to the public
• Handles all ShopLocal hosted content images across all clients
• Is the largest CDN on the planet with well over 48,000 servers in the cloud and located within over 1,000 of the worlds networks
• Provides broad global coverage with numerous strategically located data centers in over 70 countries
• Creates the capability of being able to handle any and all incoming web traffic on an OnDemand basis. So unexpected surges or spikes in traffic are seamlessly absorbed by Akamai
• Provides real time bandwidth and request error reporting to hep monitor all inbound traffic

Currently consuming over 85,000,000 MB of bandwidth from Akamai in May 2009. The rest of 2009 is a projection that is constantly being re-forecasted as time progresses.

Over the three (3) years that ShopLocal has been using Akamai, we have become more and more reliant upon them as evidenced by the strong growth rates. The biggest part however of this growth is the really just the general public's ever growing demand for online circular information. There are just more users coming to the ShopLocal hosted weekly ad site than ever before.

Rackspace – Managed & Dedicated Web Hosting

• One of the top leaders consistently in hosting providers
• Employs an “N+1″ style of disaster recovery for key areas such as HVAC, power, network and equipment.  “N+1″ means that there exists at least one additional unit that is normally not needed for regular operation but would be used if any one of the other units malfunctions
• Utilizes an extensive, multi-level security framework that includes for example a hardened and physically secure facility, dual dedicated firewall devices in front of all ShopLocal systems, no ad hoc dial-in capability into the production servers exists, proactive implementation of all recommended security patches, including anti-virus definition files, PGP (public/private key) encryption for the storage and transfer of some types of content / data, etc…
• Ensures that all production systems and related data are backed up daily
• Provides a dedicated support team to ShopLocal account
• Has developed many ShopLocal specific processes and SLAs developed over the the course of this long term partnership
• Extends 24×7x365 live support
• Constantly reviewing dashboard & threshold based monitoring of both network, hardware and system devices
• Committed to immediate response to emergency support tickets
• Offers top level certifications such as Microsoft gold certified partner
• Employees over 60+ Microsoft certified professionals many with additional Microsoft certifications

Here is a screenshot Cacti, of one of many different monitoring tools that ShopLocal and/or Rackspace uses. Others include Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) & Site Catalyst. Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool (which is the OpenSource industry standard, high performance data logging and graphing system for time series data) that stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database.

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