With news and research about Covid-19 or Coronavirus coming out on a moment to moment basis, government and healthcare agencies are doing an extraordinary job at sharing these updates with the world.
At Dom & Tom, we’ve noticed that many websites are receiving higher than normal site traffic. Many of these government and research sites are not used to the level of site traffic.
Dom & Tom’s Director of DevOps, Michael Salisbury says, “You’d be surprised how many websites and applications want to grow and scale and haven’t considered how that affects their site’s infrastructure.”
It reminds us more than even that keeping a site online and with zero downtime is beyond important. We have gathered a few best DevOps practices that can keep your site up and running while saving your money.
1) Site and Application Monitoring
When building a site or setting up an effective DevOps and hosting strategy, your first goal is to set up a site or application monitoring. What does this do? It allows you to detect anomalies with your site or app.
When building a site or launching an application, having robust monitoring capabilities can offer valuable insight into the performance and health of your application. When traffic spikes, you want to make sure you get alerts and data to prepare more resources before it becomes too much to handle and your site goes down.
You want to know when site traffic spikes, or there’s the additional pressure of the webserver, you and your team want to know, allowing you to make the needed preparations and avoid a site crash.
2) Micro-Services
Whether you’re using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure you want to make sure your site’s different elements are balanced between different services and servers.
If every part of your website is on the same stack, when anything happens to that stack, your site is at risk of a security breach or site crash. A best practice would be to support your website’s Front End with one stack or service, while the Back End/CMS is using another element.
This allows your team to make changes behind the scenes, avoiding downtime. And it’s the key to scaling and growing a product or service.
3) Auto-Scaling
While Monitoring and Micro-Services set a site up for success, Auto-Scaling allows you to add or remove services based on predetermined site metrics.
What do you do if your site has a large burst of new traffic, and a high than normal CPU?
With auto-scaling, you will have configured your site or app’s infrastructure to automatically deploy a new server to handle the increased traffic, allowing you and your organization or business to operate as usual. And then when that surge tapers off, your product will automatically scale down. Having this measure in place can scale up and down resources while being cost-effective.
All of these measures will ensure your site or product have no downtime. Additionally, this allows you and your business to scale up and down as needed, saving you time and money, but also ensuring that your users get the information they are looking for.
Looking for some DevOps and hosting advice? Schedule a complimentary consultation with our DevOps strategists and engineers here.