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Setronica’s DevOps Mastery: Maintaining and Optimizing Wowcher’s E-commerce System
Info Setronica | October 23rd, 2024
Wowcher, one of the UK’s leading deal platforms, partnered with Setronica to maintain and optimize their high-traffic e-commerce system. As the second-largest provider of discounts in the UK, Wowcher’s platform handles a massive number of daily users and transactions, similar to selling high-demand event tickets online.
The project began 8 years ago, albeit with some minor interruptions along the way. Wowcher discovered Setronica through a webpage, which led to the start of their collaboration.
Objectives
Setronica’s engagement with Wowcher was driven by several primary objectives.
- First and foremost, the team aimed to ensure the round-the-clock availability of Wowcher’s platform, maintaining operations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
- Additionally, Setronica focused on providing expert DevOps support to address complex technical challenges.
- Lastly, the engagement emphasized knowledge transfer, aiming to enhance Wowcher’s in-house capabilities through shared expertise and best practices.
Technologies
The project leveraged a diverse array of technologies:
- Ansible and Terraform for workspace support
- Ansible, Jenkins, Puppet, Terraform, and Bash/Python/Groovy scripting for CI/CD setup
- Splunk, ElasticSearch, Kibana, and fluentbit for Log Collection System Setup
- Splunk, ElasticSearch and Cloudwatch for monitoring setup
Setronica’s Solution
While Wowcher had laid the groundwork with their established system, they required Setronica’s expertise to keep it not just operational, but thriving in a competitive landscape. Setronica’s team collaborated closely with Wowcher, jointly solving technical challenges and improving the digital platform, allowing Wowcher to stay focused on their core business.
Workspace Support
In the realm of workspace support, Setronica faced a significant challenge: Wowcher’s reliance on an outdated version of Puppet for instance configuration. This legacy system not only posed potential security risks but also hindered the implementation of modern DevOps practices.
To address this issue, Setronica initiated a collaborative effort with Wowcher’s DevOps team to transition from Puppet to Ansible. The process began with a Wowcher DevOps engineer creating initial Ansible configurations, followed by Setronica’s team meticulously reviewing and refactoring the code to ensure adherence to best practices and maximize efficiency.
The move to Ansible resulted in more flexible, scalable, and maintainable infrastructure-as-code practices, significantly enhancing the overall stability and security of Wowcher’s infrastructure. This strategic shift not only resolved the immediate challenges posed by the outdated Puppet system but also positioned Wowcher for more agile and secure DevOps operations in the future.
CI/CD Setup
Setronica’s primary objective in enhancing Wowcher’s CI/CD pipeline was to significantly increase the stability of build and deploy jobs. These enhancements included optimizing existing jobs to reduce build times and boost reliability, updating CI/CD tools to leverage new features and security improvements, and creating new jobs to automate manual processes, thereby reducing human error and increasing overall efficiency.
The revamped pipeline utilized a suite of modern DevOps tools and technologies, with Jenkins serving as the primary CI/CD orchestration tool, Ansible for configuration management and application deployment, Terraform for infrastructure-as-code and cloud resource management, and custom automation scripts written in Bash, Python, and Groovy. Notably, the legacy Puppet tool was gradually phased out during this process. These comprehensive improvements resulted in a more stable, efficient, and automated CI/CD pipeline, significantly reducing deployment errors and increasing the frequency of successful releases.
Log Collection System Setup
Recognizing the critical importance of an advanced log collection system for cost optimization, feature implementation, and effective alerting, Setronica spearheaded a comprehensive, phased approach to modernize Wowcher’s log management infrastructure.
The initiative began with a strategic migration from self-hosted Splunk to Splunk Cloud, immediately enhancing scalability and reducing maintenance overhead.
This strategy leveraged a suite of cutting-edge tools: Splunk Cloud for centralized log management and analysis, AWS OpenSearch for exploring scalable cloud-native options, Kibana for intuitive log visualization and dashboarding, Fluentbit for efficient log collection and forwarding.
Monitoring Setup
Setronica’s overarching goal in enhancing Wowcher’s monitoring capabilities was to implement a comprehensive system that spans the entire infrastructure. To achieve this, Setronica is actively pursuing a three-pronged strategy focused on cost optimization, feature enhancement, and seamless integration. The team is exploring solutions that offer better value for money, identifying and implementing additional monitoring and analytics capabilities, and ensuring smooth integration between logging and monitoring solutions for a holistic view of system health. This approach leverages a powerful suite of tools, including Splunk, Elasticsearch, and for log analysis and visualization, and AWS CloudWatch for cloud resource monitoring.
While this initiative is still in progress, its ultimate aim is to equip Wowcher with a more cost-effective, feature-rich monitoring solution that provides deeper insights into their infrastructure and application performance. This ongoing effort demonstrates Setronica’s commitment to continuously improving Wowcher’s operational efficiency and technological capabilities.
Results & Client’s Feedback
Over the course of the project, numerous specific features have been implemented. To summarize some of the major developments:
- Terraform upgrade (from version 0.11.14) and refactoring
- CI/CD optimization
These improvements have contributed to the overall evolution and efficiency of the project’s infrastructure and development processes.
Key benefits to Wowcher include:
- Maintenance of a robust, high-performing e-commerce platform
- Enhanced ability to handle peak loads and transactions
- Access to expert DevOps knowledge and support
Setronica’s achievements in this partnership are equally noteworthy:
- Established a long-term partnership with a major UK e-commerce player
- Developed deep expertise in managing high-traffic, mission-critical systems
- Positioned itself as a go-to DevOps partner for complex e-commerce platforms
The consistently positive feedback from Wowcher’s COO and CTO, acknowledging Setronica’s superior knowledge and expertise, underscores the success of this partnership. As an ongoing engagement, Setronica continues to provide critical DevOps support, ensuring Wowcher’s platform runs smoothly and profitably.
At present, there is only one participant from Setronica’s side involved in the project. The immediate plans for the entire team responsible for infrastructure, not just Setronica, include migrating from Puppet to Ansible for the production environment. Additionally, they are preparing a Proof of Concept (POC) for log collection and alerting to replace the existing Splunk solution.
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Hi! I’m George, and I work as a Language Training Specialist at Setronica.
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All of us have faced the existential question "Who am I?" when meeting a new person, or when being interviewed…
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