Deployment Day: Version 1.7.3 Infrastructure automation with huge performance improvements

Posted by SolidShops on September 29, 2015 at 09:44 AM

Our servers have been running on the same hardware and software since we started out a few years ago. Of course we did some small security patches and added some servers(manually) along the way but it was time for a major upgrade!

We started out by coding our entire infrastructure with Chef and released our first Vagrant boxes to our developers in May. Once all our tests ran on this vagrant box, we upgraded our QA environment and our management servers(logging,jenkins,backups). We ran into some small environment specific issues(private ip’s, iptables)  but after we solved them, it literally took us a few hours to upgrade our entire production environment.

Although SolidShops was certainly not slow, this upgrade comes with some really nice performance improvements:

• Since most of our customers are from Europe, we migrated our entire stack from a data center in the US to a data center in Europe.  This removes 80ms latency.
• Our new servers have better specs 🙂
• We upgraded our PHP and DB software
• All our servers are upgraded with SSD disks
• We changed our hypervisor from Xen to KVM.
• We implemented full page caching for our storefronts

Your customers will notice a 400% increase in performance while browsing your products! Our goal is to keep the response time between 50ms and 100ms so your store(s) stay super fast!

Enjoy the updates everyone and let us know if you have an idea that can improve our application and our service to you. We’d love to know!