About the Project

Susoft is a SaaS, cloud-based platform that delivers complete and robust solutions to the retail sector. The business model provides user-friendly, functional solutions at a low price. Their customers are individual shops, chain stores, and those who want to open a web store.

The initial requirement of Susoft was a proactive system administration, fast response time and quick reaction to requests.

Goals of the Project

Provide a qualified and proactive system administration

Speed up Magento websites loading

Automate the creation of new Magento instances

Solution

As the client's servers store tens of VMs with websites and web stores on top, the system should be highly proactive and fault-tolerant. For this matter our System Administrator is working on the following objectives.

Linux Servers Configuration

The client’s development team has created a G1 application for offline shops. This system serves for physical shops and restaurants in Norway to manage orders and sales. Our role in their management is fault-tolerance configuration and support.

The solution for servers optimization was configuring them so the servers are highly fault-tolerant and don’t go down at a high load.

We support both dedicated servers and VMs that host the Magento web stores. To balance high loads, our team uses Nginx, PHP-FPM. Compared to Apache, Nginx allows processing requests from web browser quicker due to its non-blocking event-driven connection handling.

Magento Instances Automation

There are allocated servers with Virtual Machines on KVM hypervisor. On top of those VMs, there is a Magento platform. When a new client comes, we use a configured (with Magento) VM template for a new marketplace or an online shop. For this matter, the System Administrator has automated the new instance creation. This allows the client to not overspend human resources when reaching a new client – everything is autonomous.

Fault-tolerance Enhancement

The client struggled with database issues that used Galera Cluster for fault-tolerance. After we switched to a simpler replication solution based on Master-Slave, the system became more stable as it is easier to operate current setup.

Monitoring Configuration

As a common solution for monitoring, we added Susoft to our Zabbix monitoring system. This helps us get notifications on every lag in the system. However, the monitoring solution for Susoft involves developing scripts with Bash.

Access Rights Management

In the process of servers administration, our team encountered an access issue. The reason was in running Magento commands: all commands were executed via the wrong user. The solution that we suggested initiated executing commands via the right-holding users.

New Magento Instances Automation

The issue was that every new store was created manually. Our solution is based on developing a script that allows managers of the shops to create a new instance simply pressing one button in their app.

Project Results
During our collaboration, we have accomplished hundreds of tasks and consequently made significant changes to the Susoft infrastructure. The main improvements include:
Stable servers
Stability of the servers was reached by the means of automating processes, implementing monitoring, and fixing long-standing issues.
Fault-tolerant database infrastructure
Highly fault-tolerant DB infrastructure due to the use of a simpler replication solution.
Quicker website loading
Quicker loading of the Magento websites as a result of changing configuration of the database.
Technologies we use
Clients' Feedback
Svein Lindelid
CEO at Susoft

We are pleased with the services provided by OpsWorks Co.

Oleksandr Slubsky
CTO&Co-founder at LMS Collaborator

Our team is impressed by the job quality and professional skills level of the engineers at OpsWorks Col. These guys are known to do their job pretty good!

Oleksandr Slubsky
CTO&Co-founder at LMS Collaborator

Our team is impressed by the job quality and professional skills level of the engineers at OpsWorks Col. These guys are known to do their job pretty good!