from Jan Griesel
In his keynote speech at the 8th plentymarkets Online Sellers Congress, founder and CEO Jan Griesel presented the top four plentymarkets topics. One of the most important innovations relates to the plentymarkets cloud. Take a look at the details.
Over 99 percent of our customers use plentymarkets in the cloud. Understandable, as that is usually the easiest solution: The systems process more and more revenue while the technology runs invisibly in the background. Our customers rightly expect the cloud to always be accessible and to run smoothly. Unfortunately, that didn't work as well as we would have liked it to recently. That's why we began searching for a better solution - and we found one.
The goal: Minimizing the risk of malfunctions
Our previous on-site cloud is secured with firewalls. Load balancing is used to ensure that our server can answer the numerous HTTP requests. The cloud is divided into multiple segments, which only include the installations of plentymarkets.
There are two copies of every cluster, i.e. of every server unit. It isn't usually a big problem if something should happen to one of them. All of the new requests are then simply rerouted to the alternative servers. This happens within seconds or a few minutes.
However, it is a problem if something happens outside of the cluster. For example, if the provider is not able to supply an Internet connection or if the city's power goes out for a longer period of time. This causes us to sound the alarm. This is an uncomfortable scenario, and an uncertainty factor that we want to minimize.
The solution: alternative server sites
We asked the experts at Crisp Research AG for advice. We wanted to have a system that is scalable, flexible and quickly available. We wanted to have all of this in several different countries at the same time, and we wanted to have as much processing power as possible! Our cloud doesn't have any design deficiencies and it relies only on Linux tools. This increased the number of possible providers. Two equal candidates remained at the end of our selection process: IBM Softlayer and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
These providers make a wide range of servers available in their computing centers. We can rent and install the servers there automatically. The advantages: It only takes a few minutes to set up and group the servers together in a cluster. As such, we can quickly react to growing needs and we can offer more complex failover scenarios than before.
Part of a cluster can even be located in a computing center in a different country. If one location fails, then HTTP requests will be redirected to a different location - in principle anywhere throughout the world. We do not have to change our existing cluster architecture. Many of our customers requested such a solution.
Technology and service that rock!
Not only are we making our servers more reliable, but we are also making them perform better than ever with HHVM. This alternative PHP compiler ensures that our customers' online stores are provided even quicker.
In our Service Center, simply let us know if your plentymarkets system is hosted in a cluster or on your own server. Our Service Center can automatically set up servers in every cluster, install the necessary software and install plentymarkets – just like magic! When switching from a different system, our customers determine when data should be transferred.
We are confident that these new improvements will help us avoid malfunctions and will allow our customers to perform even better. We will begin looking for the first candidates for the new cloud in April. This service will become available to everyone in June. By the way: TÜV reviewed the entire process and awarded us with a certificate for certified cloud security on the day of the congress.