2x better stability for SaaS solution in retail sector

Initially Susoft requested provision of qualified and proactive system administration, acceleration of Magento sites loading, and automation/creation of new Magento instances. 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. The biggest issue was the fact that Monitoring was not configured, the server performance was insufficient, and therefore required the migration of the infrastructure to the cloud and the integration of Zabbix 6.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.