Backendless is a US-based company that offers a platform for developing mobile applications without the need for coding skills. The platform’s functionality includes tools for creating both the frontend and backend sides, allowing Backendless’s customers to bring their ideas to life without coding skills.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

The Backendless platform is a popular solution used by hundreds of customers, ranging from small startups to large corporations. Before partnering with SHALB, Backendless allowed customers to deploy the platform in their environments while hosting the installation on a server. However, as more enterprise customers began using public cloud services, Backendless needed to provide the ability to deploy its SaaS within their cloud accounts.

Moreover, Backendless aimed to make their software easily installable. Ideally, they wanted it to be a single command that could enable fast and hassle-free installation on the customer’s side.

Additionally, Backendless had another requirement: to be closer to their customers around the globe, they needed to quickly launch new AWS regions in specific areas. However, this was technically challenging since the company’s infrastructure wasn’t codified. The task required manual reproduction of stack configuration; a lengthy and complex process. Moreover, Backendless was time-constrained as they planned to launch marketing campaigns in new geographic locations soon.

WHY THEY CHOSE US

After evaluating different contractors for the tasks, Backendless decided to choose SHALB. Having been a customer of ours before, they were already highly satisfied with our services. So, when they needed help again, they didn’t hesitate to contact us.

The tasks assigned to us by Backendless included:

• Developing a solution that would enable quick and easy deployment of their enterprise SaaS on the customer’s side.
• Integrating the solution within the complex Backendless system.
• Providing the Backendless team with the ability to swiftly launch AWS regions within new target areas.

PROJECT DELIVERY

During the course of the project, the SHALB team developed a codified solution that enables the quick deployment of a fully-fledged AWS infrastructure with an EKS cluster. The cluster is launched with a pre-installed set of the customer’s software, including databases and workloads, and a monitoring and logging stack is set up.

For the infrastructure deployment and provisioning, we used Cluster.dev – SHALB’s very own solution for managing cloud-native infrastructures. The advantages of using Cluster.dev met all the requirements for this particular project, including:

1. Fast and easy deployment of SaaS. We could have employed Terraform to achieve the same results. However, Cluster.dev has a simpler configuration and, unlike Terraform, allows for a one-command deployment.
2. Saving time on resource validation. Cluster.dev has its own state, which eliminates lengthy validation of AWS resources performed by Terraform every time before applying changes. In large infrastructures with frequent deployments, like that of Backendless, it can save up to two hours of working time per day.
3. Managing complex systems. Backendless has a complex infrastructure with many interconnected resources. Cluster.dev is ideal for managing such systems as it keeps track of interrelations and dependencies among components.

Challenges

According to Roman Progonnyj, the senior DevOps engineer engaged in the project, the hardest part was integrating the developed solution with the customer’s existing stack while complying with its logic. This required developing numerous connecting points that our engineers devised in collaboration with the customer’s team.

To summarize; the SHALB team had to integrate several components together and teach them how to work with one another seamlessly. For example, teach the Backendless workload to work with Cluster.dev and perform additional functions such as creating domains and Ingress controllers in EKS using Kubernetes API, and enabling the Cert manager to access the domain zone in another account. All of this required a high level of technical expertise and collaboration between SHALB and Backendless teams.

PROJECT OUTCOME

After the project’s completion, Backendless gained a fully codified solution for deploying their enterprise SaaS on customers’ cloud accounts. The solution was seamlessly integrated with Backendless’ existing system and complied with its inner logic. This enabled the company to quickly launch new AWS regions in required areas, making it easier to be closer to their customers around the world.

The solution also allowed for fast and easy installation of Backendless’s SaaS on the customer’s side, which now takes less than an hour. A one-command launch eliminates the need for lengthy and complex manual reproducing of stack configurations, while a high level of automation minimizes chances of human-induced errors.

Building infrastructure code with Cluster.dev simplifies its further management and has certain advantages compared to Terraform.

CONCLUSION

The SHALB team has the knowledge and skills for building infrastructures of any complexity. So, if you have any problems with your existing infrastructure, don’t hesitate to contact us. Book an online meeting or contact sales@shalb.com for more information. We’ll be happy to hear from you!

The post Revolutionizing Enterprise SaaS Deployment: How Backendless Achieved Swift and Seamless Installation with SHALB appeared first on SHALB.

PartsTech is a US-based start-up that helps auto repair shops find the right parts. The company provides an online platform that links repair shops with distributors and manufacturers. Working with a large network of suppliers, both locally & nationally, PartsTech enables one-stop shopping for their customers.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

PartsTech has a cloud-based infrastructure that enables their customers to look for products’ pricing and availability in real time. Needless to say that for their business to be successful everything should run like clockwork. Any infrastructure issue such as search not working or databases down could affect their customers and as a result, their sales.

Moreover, PartsTech planned to further grow their business, which meant the increasing number of customers and as such, more queries to process. That made the question of reliable infrastructure of paramount importance. Still, the company’s existing infrastructure could have hardly been called so: PartsTech struggled with major downtime issues every couple of months.

To make things worse, they couldn’t find a reliable system administrator who would oversee their infrastructure. At some point, as Olexy Sadovy, CTO at PartsTech recalls, they grew tired of this. So, when somebody from the PartsTech team recommended us, they were happy to get in touch and start working with SHALB.

WHY THEY CHOSE US

Having talked with Alexander Iatsuk, CEO at SHALB, Olexy Sadovy was pleased with our approach and the ways we suggested solving their problems:

Over 10 years of DevOps experience and extensive cloud expertise make SHALB engineers fully understand the customers’ needs and the space of their projects. We were happy to join hands with the PartsTech team to design the most optimal solution for them.

PROJECT DELIVERY

By the time PartsTech started working with SHALB, they already had a Kubernetes-based infrastructure on AWS, with clusters managed by kOps. However, as long as the clusters were self-hosted, it required manual management of Kubernetes masters (etcd, API) and backups, which significantly complicated cluster updates and often resulted in system downtimes. On top of that, the PartsTech infrastructure was not fully described in code. The codified pieces and Terraform documentation didn’t match the actual configuration, which made the infrastructure difficult to manage and reproduce.

As part of the project, SHALB engineers covered the whole PartsTech infrastructure with Terraform code and had it transitioned to managed EKS clusters. With AWS being responsible for cluster upgrades, the whole process became easier and more predictable. The EKS clusters were launched and provisioned by Cluster.dev – SHALB’s very own solution for infrastructure automation and management. Cluster.dev manages all necessary infrastructure used by EKS, such as IAM Roles, subnet tagging, and EC2-workers configuration.

To deploy the PartsTech infrastructure, we used one of the Cluster.dev stack templates and customized it according to the customer’s needs. Following the IaC approach, all working is done through the Cluster.dev infrastructure repository, ensuring the exact correspondence between the code and actual infrastructure.

PROJECT OUTCOME

Working with SHALB, PartsTech achieved their main goal: infrastructure reliability. According to Olexy Sadovy, the company had no major downtimes since the project implementation. Now, as PartsTech has a scalable and well-performing infrastructure, they are much more confident about their plans to grow the business. Olexy Sadovy says:

By transitioning the PartsTech infrastructure under Cluster.dev management we automated most of the infrastructure processes, this way minimizing human intervention and the chances of human errors. What is more, Cluster.dev templating enabled the PartsTech team to easily launch new environments for testing and development needs: with the cdev template it takes only a few minutes to spin up an infrastructure replica. Now they can have a production-ready EKS cluster with defined roles and provisioned worker nodes in less than an hour.

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

Commenting on the works done, Olexy Sadovy admits that they are pretty happy with the achieved results: PartsTech has done with infrastructure issues and got a reliable partner whose expertise they can trust. With SHALB teammates constantly sharing their knowledge and skills, PartsTech feels like they have access to the knowledge base of not just people they work with, but of all SHALB engineers as well. On top of that, they really appreciate the synergy of PartsTech and SHALB teams working together on solving issues.

Currently PartsTech keeps on collaborating with SHALB to maintain their new infrastructure. As for the project, it was not that much technically challenging rather than complex in terms of making things right:

Olexy Sadovy, CTO at PartsTech

The problem with our project was we had so many people working on it that it was very convoluted, – comments Olexy Sadovy. – So it was really hard to untangle all this mess. And I think SHALB did a great job of working with that. We had a couple of bumps but we got through that and I think we ended up on the good side of it.

Working on the PartsTech project proved how smoothly the transition from almost having no system administration to having some could be. Our engineers seamlessly integrate into your workflow and work as part of your in-house team to achieve better results.

So, if you have any problems with your existing infrastructure, don’t hesitate to contact us. Book an online meeting or contact sales@shalb.com for more information. We’ll be happy to hear from you!

The post Reliable and secure infrastructure for auto parts marketplace appeared first on SHALB.

Horoshop is a Ukrainian e-commerce company that provides a namesake SaaS platform for running online businesses. Horoshop has over 3500 customers; the platform hosts around 8 thousand e-shops and nearly 18 thousand domains.

The company’s web toolkit allows for creating fully-fledged, easily customizable e-shops from predefined design patterns, and includes marketing tools for analytics, SEO, and integration with 3rd party services. An advanced set of features and flexibility of use enable Horoshop to successfully compete with marketplaces and other e-commerce solutions such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Opencart.

WHY THEY CHOSE US

When asked about the deciding factors for working with SHALB, Igor Stolnitsky, CEO of Horoshop, cited technical expertise and a deep understanding of customer needs demonstrated by our team:

The specialists at Shalb did not just fulfill our task. They studied our business and understood our needs better than we did. And they offered their proposal on how best to solve our problem.

When our collaboration started, Horoshop was on its way to becoming a fully-fledged SaaS platform. SHALB development work helped the company reach new heights, providing it with a reliable server architecture to support its business initiative, and a CMS to control customers on the platform.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Infrastructure

Horoshop infrastructure runs on a bare-metal cluster managed by Docker Swarm. It mainly uses three types of servers to run the workloads: Swarm working nodes, MySQL database servers, and NFS storage servers (recently migrated to Amazon S3).

A pivotal element of the Horoshop infrastructure is Rundeck – a workflow orchestration system that drives most of the company’s inner processes. Basically, it is a console to manage and work with the Horoshop platform, providing for adding new customers, setting them up, or changing domain configuration. In addition, Rundeck is responsible for the CI/CD process of running Shell scripts for building images, code delivery, and version upgrades. It also accounts for the support of multiple platform versions – an additional functionality developed by SHALB that enables VIP features for the Horoshop customers.

To codify a bare-metal Horoshop infrastructure, we used Hiver – a customized tool developed by one of the leading SHALB experts, Roman Progonnyj. Hiver combines the functionality of a package manager, IaC, and CI/CD tools. It builds cluster manifests, applies templating to render them, and deploys rendered manifests to Docker Swarm. As an IaC tool, Hiver plays a key role in the setup of new servers.

Databases

Most of Horoshop’s applications are database-centric, which makes their performance largely dependent on the state of databases. The growing number of Horoshop customers led to an increase in database queries and write operations, causing Horoshop’s systems to underperform. It was a core problem that could not be solved by simply adding more hardware resources to a database server.

To scale Horoshop’s databases, we used sharding – a method of partitioning large databases across several servers. The approach allows for the scaling of sharded systems to a required level of capacity without adding resources to a single server. We partitioned Horoshop’s systems on a customer basis and dedicated an independent MySQL cluster for each shard. Achieving a balance between database size and system resources helped us effectively address the performance and scalability challenges of Horoshop’s systems.

Domain management

Horoshop accommodates nearly 18 thousand domains on its platform. Each domain has its own settings that define the resources to be used – databases, NFS storages, SSL certificates, etc. – and the type of content to be displayed in response to a query. With over ten thousand domains in service, it has a myriad of parameters to deal with. Horoshop was struggling to provide effective management of its customers’ domains.

Each domain was defined in Nginx as a virtual host with its own pack of settings. The domain parameters accounted for users’ redirection to particular websites and kept the customers’ data isolated. However, as the number of Horoshop customers grew, managing all domains in a single config became a nightmare: the Nginx process increasingly demanded more time and resources to complete. It was a bottleneck problem that SHALB specialists effectively solved by adding one more Nginx to the cluster configuration.

Now, one Nginx controller acts as a reverse proxy to accept HTTP and HTTPS web queries, expose them to services within the cluster, and provide for SSL termination. The other controller is configured in the application backend to perform rewrites, redirects, and checking queries for certain parameters. Distributing Nginx functionality allowed us to reduce its operational load and diminish the size of Nginx config, making it easily runnable.

Solving the issue with SSL certificates

Horoshop relies on Let’s Encrypt to enable secure connections on the platform. But how to provide certificates for all its customers without hitting specified limits and keep them up-to-date? Considering the number of Horoshop domains, it was a difficult task to accomplish. SHALB specialists developed a customized controller that automatically obtains new certificates for Horoshop customers and configures them for use. It also checks the certificates’ expiry date and updates them on time without human intervention.

PROJECT OUTCOME

On completion of the project, Horoshop acquired a reliable infrastructure that ensures the stability of its systems. The bare metal cluster run by Docker Swarm contains everything to provide Horoshop’s platform with its vital capacity, which is:

• A system for releasing new platform versions
• CMS for customer management and updating client websites
• Effective solution for domain management
• Analytics and monitoring of all server metrics and platform events by Grafana and Kibana
• Operational support 24/7.

Over five years, Horoshop’s server cluster has gone through 2 global architecture upgrades with no platform downtime. According to Igor Stolnitsky, the solution proved its quality over time: the easy and cheap to scale cluster allowed for a tenfold increase in Horoshop’s customer numbers while still keeping the size of its team unchanged.

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

When asked about the aspects of our collaboration that he liked most, Igor Stolnitsky mentioned effective cooperation and the synergy of both teams.

Igor Stolnitsky, CEO of Horoshop

We have been working with the same specialists for all five years, and it felt very close to being one team.

SHALB is proud to be a part of the Horoshop success story. For the five years that our teams have worked hand-in-hand, this case proved to be one of the most unusual yet technically challenging SHALB projects.

SHALB specialists provide services for infrastructure development and maintenance for projects of any complexity. Our team is flexible, accommodating, and knowledgeable. Book an online meeting or contact sales@shalb.com to see it for yourself. We’d be delighted to hear from you!

The post Reliable server architecture for one of the biggest SaaS companies in Ukraine appeared first on SHALB.