Solution: Managed Cloud Services Industry: Media

Improving portal performance and reliability using AWS

Scalable architecture
<architecture.optimized>
Efficient backup system
<system.supported>
Increased efficiency of the internal IT team
<knowledge.transfer>

The Challenge

Lubimyczytać.pl is the largest Polish internet review portal for “Culture and Literature”, and is co-created by a large community of book fans. The portal also plays an informative role – it publishes interviews and news from the cultural and literary world.

The service contains information about 500,000 titles and its users have so far written over 2.3 million opinions about books.

Apart from virtual libraries, it also provides a comparison engine (BuyBox) for users to check the prices of both physical books and e-books in various stores.

Since 2016, the portal has been conducting its “Book of the Year” plebiscite, which is gaining more and more participants every year – 2019’s edition received over 250 thousand votes.

  • With a growing user base (3 mln per month) Lubimyczytac’s portal management team asked Unity Group for support in strengthening the stability and security of the website.
  • The company was ending its reliance on third party support for critical systems and components in the application.
  • However, they were not able to handle a growing group of users, especially during high jumps in activity during important marketing events, such as the Nobel Prize for Olga Tokarczuk.
  • The single point of failutre (SPOF) architecture was also increasing the risk of application instability.
  • Flawed Disaster Recovery processes and the wider backup system impacted application speed.
  • The development team was burdended with handling incidents resulting from these issues.
  • Overall, existing application was development due to a lack of isolated, production-identical test environments.
Mateusz Tobiczyk
Development Director
Lubimyczytać.pl

"From the beginning our cooperation changing the server infrastructure of the Lubimyczytac.pl website, Unity Group’s team provided us with multi-level support, going through successive stages of implementation with us – consultations and planning, testing stages, the implementation itself and cost optimizations after moving to AWS."

The Solution

  • Together with the team of Lubimyczytać.pl programmers we have gained knowledge about servers, environments and components of the service and described the infrastructure in code form (IaC in Terraform).
  • We migrated and replatformed to Amazon Web Services, replacing various components with services managed by AWS.
  • Thus, we have replaced elements that lacked high availability with services that have HA built in, such as Amazon Elastic File System.
  • We have implemented auto-scaling for application servers, thanks to which the power of used resources adapts to current needs.
  • By implementing a Content Delivery Network, we further reduced server loads and improved page loading times.
  • We supported the team in implementing Responsive Web Design to cover all devices.
  • With Amazon Elastic Block Store’s native snapshot generation feaure, backup processes have also been created.
  • We have prepared a new, more convenient and unrestricted implementation process for new versions of the application.

The Result

High Availability
The use of AWS services & architecture made the application resistant to individual server failure.
<failure.resistant>
Distaster Recovery
The service quickly recovers even if the entire data center fails.
<always.available>
Knowledge transfer
Lubimyczytac’s programmers can now design more optimal and reliable solutions.
<team.supported>
Improved Backup System
Regular backups also no longer impact application efficiency.
<efficient.application>
Higher team efficiency
Freeing up the time of the team overloaded with failures, which allows for further improvement of processes or handling new projects.
<time.optimized>
Scalable architecture
Ready to handle high user traffic.
<availability.maintained>
Mateusz Tobiczyk
Development Director
Lubimyczytać.pl

"Thanks to the good cooperation and commitment of the technical team and people responsible for running the project at Unity Group, the whole operation was completed within the planned time and budget."

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