Boomstarter in the cloud - who helps launch new projects?

    Hello!

    Today we have Ruslan Tugushev, the founder of Boomstarter , which has been developing a crowdfunding platform for 3.5 years and advising project authors on how to raise money with your money. At the time of March 2016, projects have already attracted more than 210 million rubles, and Ruslan talks about how Microsoft Azure supports the platform with already infrastructural capabilities. Just recently, Boomstarter helped to assemble the Mayak space project without seven thousand two million rubles - the most successful space project in the history of Boomstarter! Under the cut - details.



    About the launch of Boomstarter

    Boomstarter launched very successfully, as we were one of the first crowdfunding platforms aimed at a Russian-speaking audience. From a technological point of view, the launch went smoothly, without unpleasant surprises, due to the fact that we relied on proven technologies. Although the hardware sometimes throws up surprises (we ran the project on leased dedicated servers), but most often we were ready for them. Now we are one of the leading crowdfunding platforms in Russia, we are visited by 300,000 unique visitors every month, and we mainly focus on the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet. We know that Habr loves space, and we have projects that are directly related to it. One of the last successfully completed such projects is the Mayak space satellite,The Lighthouse project is the most successful space project in the history of Boomstarter!



    The author of the project, Alexander Shaenko, gave a small tip about working with Boomstarter: “The best part is that Boomstarter is not a platform, it is a service where there are people who are ready to help with advice and deed. Many tips have been heard and implemented. Within the framework of this project, we became convinced that there are so many enthusiasts, engineers and space lovers among us that the topic of popularizing space exploration is interesting to people. That people are ready to unite and help in the fight against the problem of space debris.

    We got a lot of useful contacts, partners who help our project.
    And, of course, we got the opportunity to implement a project that the whole world will know about this year! ”




    About choosing a cloud

    We considered all possible options and feared unobvious problems and, as a result, prolonged unavailability of services. Analyzing the possible disadvantages and advantages of various approaches to deploying our platform, we naturally decided to ignore physical problems with servers. At the same time, of course, at the very beginning there were many doubts, especially in the context of which platform to choose, but thanks to positive reviews, the choice ultimately fell on Microsoft Azure and after the tests, almost all doubts disappeared. In general, we expected to see a more stable operation of the service and a decrease in the cost of expanding services and maintaining operability in the long term. What the cloud has given us, we are satisfied.

    About technology and migration

    With the exception of moving file storage, the migration was unexpectedly easy. The technical department of the project was enthusiastic about migration and the cloud platform. It was mostly time consuming, and moving files from Amazon S3 to Azure storage was a particularly difficult part. Our volumes did not allow the transfer with at least some acceptable downtime, so we were forced to transfer data incrementally. What I would like to have, and what was not, is a ready-made tool for these tasks. In fact, even pulling a list of files from S3 turned out to be a non-trivial task: ready-made tools could not cope with our volumes. When we finally got the list of files and launched our proprietary migration tool, we were disappointed: the estimated time calculations exceeded a month and a half! We had to teach our utility to parallelize, including to run on multiple machines. Here we were helped by the possibility of a cloud of quick introduction of additional machines into operation.



    If we talk about technology, then, since our project is directly related to finances, we had to take a responsible approach (and came up) with the choice of technologies. The main requirements were reliability and lack of vulnerabilities. Of course, we were also interested in the speed of development.

    Architecturally, our project is a completely standard web application, including for mobile clients, with a three-tier architecture. The main tool used is Ruby On Rails. A large amount of logic is submitted to the frontend.

    Azure Redis Cache, a fault-tolerant Azure implementation of Microsoft Redis as a service in the cloud, is used for caching. Data is stored in PostgreSQL, for background tasks - resque. Everything is quite traditional for Ruby On Rails, and time-tested solutions.

    Conclusion

    Our workload is growing steadily and smoothly, but thanks to the scalability of the cloud, we are ready for sharp bursts - this allows us to think less about infrastructure problems and maintenance of equipment and services and focus on applied tasks. The cloud met all expectations, but this is also a great merit of our employees - we thoughtfully approached the task, implemented everything on time (despite the fact that the file storage had to be delayed for some time) and the infrastructure was neatly moved.

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