24/7 Linux Administration by DevOps Team for a US Hosting Provider
Customer
The Customer, an American company, is a managed hosting platform provider offering fast, secure and reliable hosting for websites built on the WordPress CMS. Among the Customer’s clients there are AMD, HTC, SoundCloud, Foursquare, etc.
Challenge
As a hosting platform provider, the Customer has quite an extensive environment comprised of around 2000 open source servers running several Linux distributions (Debian, Redhat, CentOS). The company provides shared hosting (a number of websites hosted on one server) and multisite hosting (geographically distributed environment) services for various kinds of WordPress solutions. As the Customer is committed to ensuring stability and security of the hosting platform, centralized and continuous maintenance of its servers is required.
Solution
ScienceSoft has assigned a team of five DevOps engineers who have competences not only in configuration management but also in development, which implies that they can also write scripts and code as well as optimize system configurations. The team employs Zabbix and Nagios monitoring systems that are configured to track server failures. When a ticket is reported, the DevOps analyze the problem and proceed to its elimination. They constantly optimize operations and write scripts in order to enhance the automation of these processes.
The use of such configuration management tools as Puppet and Chef allows to configure numerous servers by means of running one central management server. Additionally, ScienceSoft’s team is responsible for providing full-scale security solutions to mitigate the effects of DDoS attacks and prevent any other threat that can cause downtime or system damage.
Results
The Customer has its servers up and running 24/7 owing to ScienceSoft’s integral and uninterrupted maintenance.
Technologies and Tools
Operating systems: Linux (Debian, Redhat, CentOS).
Web server: Apache HTTP Server, Nginx.
Revision control systems: Apache Subversion (SVN), Git.
Scripting languages: PHP, Perl, Bash.
Network management systems: Zabbix, Nagios.
Configuration management systems: Puppet, Chef.
Other tools: MemcacheDB, MySQL database, Varnish daemon.
