For the past two years AFD’s hosted service has delivered 100% uptime – no outages, no partial outages, and no degraded performance.
This achievement and commitment to the thousands of customers that rely on AFD’s data validation and cleansing solutions is the culmination of a successful project to overhaul the infrastructure used to deliver our hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) transactional products.
Our goal was to build a robust, scalable, and highly available system to serve our valued customers, even better. After months of hard work and dedication, we’re excited to share the improvements we’ve made and how they benefit the thousands of organisations that rely on our services.
The Need for Change
Our previous system was reliable and offered low latency, but it had limited scaling ability. One of the main reasons for this change was to introduce Kubernetes® for our container orchestration. Kubernetes, often abbreviated as k8s, is an open-source container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications. It was originally developed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Containers are a lightweight virtualisation technology that allows our hosted applications to be packaged with their dependencies and run consistently across different environments. This makes it easier to develop, deploy, and manage applications at scale. However, when you have numerous containers running across multiple machines, managing them manually can be challenging. This is where Kubernetes comes in.
Kubernetes provides a powerful and flexible framework for managing containerised applications in a distributed computing environment.
Our Transformation Journey
During this project, our skilled DevOps team made significant changes to our architecture. Here are the key improvements we implemented:
Summary
Our dedication to innovation and improvement has led us to develop an infrastructure that delivers unmatched performance, scalability, and reliability for our hosted (SaaS) transactional products. We are confident that these enhancements will make our service even better, and we look forward to supporting your continued success with our cutting-edge solutions.
More information on our hosted solutions can be found in our developers section.