Carsales moves website into AWS

Auto ads Site Carsales has completed the migration of your website in the public cloud Amazon Web Services to achieve greater flexibility and to prepare for an active-active future.

The company is no stranger to public cloud services, after receiving your disaster recovery AWS for some time and its image in infrastructure for Microsoft Azure ago.

Until this month, the site Carsales was received in an establishment Hostworks.

But after being impressed by the performance of your disaster recovery environment in AWS Carsales it started there a year shifting your production environment in the same configuration described.

"Carsales used to be a monolith, which was basically a big piece of very tightly integrated code, and implementing the code once or twice a week," the group operations director Dmitry Carsales Kulchitsky said.

"In the last two years, we were on the way to microservices and the creation of a number of components: the Carsales site now consists of hundreds of parts that work independently most moving, but along with the other".

This meant that the company needs to ensure that any new platform could manage all these moving parts while being able to change the way Carsales wanted.

Earlier this month, efficient production and DR environments around reversed; the first is now in AWS and now is Hostworks DR.

While the actual migration that occurred in a day, Carsales engineers spent planning year, and testing and traffic are replicated to ensure the new infrastructure would be able to climb up and down and accept the amount of site traffic web is set to the maximum load.

Carsales decided to accept as its testing infrastructure in AWS, releasing about five or six locally hosted servers in the central office of the company.

The measure reduces test time of about an hour in minutes.

"What was important because we had much to do in so little time," director of quality assurance Scott Clements he said.
The test equipment for the preparation of production in four areas: performance, network security and scability.
Carsales imitating the production flow of traffic to the new environment, which showed an increase of 25 percent in the current production volumes.
"That gave us a lot of confidence in the new platform," Clements said.

future active-active

While the company was one of the earlier adopters of public cloud, Kulshitsky said Carsales only push workloads in such environments where it made sense.

"We realize that some have no place in the cloud, especially where there is no need for elasticity, we are very aware of it," he said.

All platforms that do not require elasticity Hostworks remain for now, he said, but Carsales engineers have their eyes on an active-active configuration in the next year.

"Our ultimate goal is to run an active-active to protect us from all problems in the regional center or data system," Kulshitsky said.

Before he can do that, the company will decide whether to maintain its fierce agnostic vendor or supplier standardization mentality would be more effective.

"We have two schools of thought about it," Kulshitsky said.

"Being with a vendor is easier in terms of ease of use, but do not like vendor lock-in, so we do agnostic cloud and have more than one provider?

"We quite like the way the Hostworks AWS and, for the moment, but in the long term, there is the temptation to standardize on a particular provider for simplicity. But then also be able to switch providers if Proposition best value ".

building abstraction layers was observed to enable its platforms to operate in any hosting provider could be the answer.

"It is difficult to run a Windows or Linux server Hostworks or AWS or Azure, there is sill a Windows or Linux server so you can talk to him in the same way," Kulshitsky said.

"We want our solution architect so that there is a layer of abstraction that speak directly to these components and minimize our dependence on one supplier."