Category: Infrastructure

As part of our big infrastructure upgrade, we have improved our processes for database backups that are in addition to the AWS Aurora automated backups. The Aurora backups are good from a reliability point of view with features like enables point-in-time recovery. However, the…

We try to improve our infrastructure in Q1 of each year to make sure we do not build up technical debt and stay on top of the most current trends in technology. We have four goals when we look at this each…

There are a number of processes that run on a scheduled basis in a big system like RunSignup – these are called Chronjobs. They are typically run on one server in most environments, and that is how we did things until today….

Yes, we know these infrastructure updates are kind of boring. But we want to document them. This one involves if there is a loss of connection to the read replica database(s). It now auto-failovers to the master database. We had two instances…

We continue to do our annual big infrastructure update. Improvements to date have decreased average page load time across all devices (over 50% are mobile phones) from about 3.2 seconds to 2.85 seconds. While that does not sound like a lot, that…

We have upgraded our web servers to PHP 5.6. to continue to keep our software stacks up to date. We have also upgraded our log handling mechanism. We now save logs for 3 years in AWS S3. We make use of the the Amazon…

As we continue to upgrade our infrastructure over these few weeks, we have improved our error handling and auto-recovery on our NGINX load balancers. What this means is if there are network or server problems, the system we have in place will…

We have also completed an upgrade of our hardware infrastructure over the past week. This includes upgrades to our front end load balancers, our web servers and our database server (we left the memcache servers the same since they are so over-sized…

We did a major database upgrade to Amazon Aurora MySQL this morning (with zero downtime!). This upgrade increases performance, improves scalability, improves reliability, availability and positions RunSignUp for continued growth and change. We were one of the Beta test sites for Aurora, and were…