Case Study:

Business listings portal for a large media house

Client

Our client is one of the largest media houses in the country with many flagship brands. Their ventures in Print Media, Television, Radio and Internet are leaders in their respective category.

The business challenge

As a part of their internet strategy they had developed multiple portals providing services to local, national and international markets. The brand had already established a loyal consumer following, and for their new business listings portal which allows people to discover new businesses and business owners to set up accounts, upload photos and avail a wide range of other features, they were expecting the web traffic to grow at a rapid rate. Hence they were on the lookout for a Highly Available, Performant, Horizontally Scalable and Secure solution.

Solution

HiFX after deliberating the requirements came out with an architecture that would ensure high availability and scalability while maintaining performance.

To ensure high availability a cloud platform with geographically dispersed data centers was chosen. Amazon Elastic Load Balancer and HAProxy were used to offer load balancing and HA. Every layer was designed for failure so that nothing fails in production. The components were designed to be loosely coupled to maximize plug and play.

The system is built on top of Restful web services which powers the web front end and the mobile applications. Apache, PHP, APC and Memcached powers the Front End and Api layers. Solr was chosen as the search platform for its powerful full-text search and faceted search features. Varnish was used to accelerate the apis as it was written from ground up with performance and flexibility in mind. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) was chosen as the data store to make use of the Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) deployment. Realtime Monitoring is done via Zabbix which takes care of Availability and SLA reporting as well.

Because of the nature of the business, HiFX anticipated that the infrastructure requirements would change rapidly and Amazon Web Services were used to address this. This includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon CloudWatch.

The portal has seen a rapid growth in its traffic since the inception, and HiFX's solution has ensured that it has been a smooth sail.