3 new destination markets in some months
It's been a bit of a busy time lately as we launched three new platforms in the last time and that brought with it a lot of challenges. Fortunately it also pushed me to complete our migration to our new backend which is now entirely message driven and based only on the finest stuff one finds in t...
Three new destination markets in some months
It's been a bit of a busy time lately as we launched three new platforms in the last time and that brought with it a lot of challenges. Fortunately it also pushed me to complete our migration to our new backend which is now entirely message driven and based only on the finest stuff one finds in the moment.
The backend engine is RabbitMQ based and persists messages to CouchDB if necessary. We have a simple home grown workflow engine that enables us to easily customise and change flows like what happens if a domain gets registered or exactly when we charge a user. I spoke about an early version of this workflow engine last year at the erlounge Wellington (http://norbu09.org/2009/10/15/one-system-to-rule-them-all.html). This backend engine is a scalable hub for tasks and the main challenge was to make our frontend stupid simple and more or less only a wrapper for tasks happening in the backend. We have now nearly all the logic moved and the frontend is quite slim, holding only the e-commerce and user profile functionality whereas all the domain specific functionality moved out.
The next step was to make our frontend not only simple but also brandable and multi currency/language. This is the moment where you notice that strings are everywhere and solid internal APIs pay off big time. This challenge was a big one but we managed to master it and have now an English, German and Dutch version online selling in USD, EUR and NZD. The frontend is a generic one that has many configuration knobs that can tweak the functionality but it is still only one code base for all projects. The template sets are separate so each language has its own template set. The two English speaking platforms share a template set but have different currencies - the content however is not 100% the same on the two. All this needs lots of config variables to check against and Template::Toolkit was a big help here.
As you can see there went a lot of effort into designing a flexible system that can act in different environments and still be only one system. Most of the content is now served out of CouchDB and we further reduced the amount of data stored in PostgreSQL as well as hard coded texts in templates. We rewrote our shopping card from scratch and the checkout process is really simple now as most of the heavy lifting is now in the backend. Stuff we are working on in the moment is Session handling and user management in CouchDB with a goal to strip out PostgreSQL entirely (the according Catalyst::Plugins are on the way). Don't get me wrong, we love PostgreSQL but there is no need for it anymore once we have the remaining things ported over to CouchDB. It simplifies our stack and reduces our admin overhead.
Speaking of admin overhead - we also run all setups (including local development VMs) off a puppet setup and code/template/CouchDB rollout is done via capistrano which turns out to work quite well with catalyst and perl. We roll out a new frontend webserver in about half an hour from bare debian to running frontend with the most time being spent waiting for puppet and no manual step other then installing puppet.
You see we have been busy, if you find bugs, report them. We know that the performance in the DNS editor is still crap but we try to sort that and there are some rough edges here and there but most of the platforms should run smoothly. It was a steep learning curve once again but we managed to create a scalable system that is extremely flexible and fast.
... hope you like it ...