Hosted Service

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: 

  • Orchestration Tool Upgrade: We adopted Rancher 2.x, which uses Kubernetes for container orchestration. This change has enhanced the management of our containerised applications and made our system more agile. 
  • Automated Deployments: We now use Terraform to automate the deployment of our infrastructure. This results in faster, more reliable, and consistent deployments, ultimately reducing human error and ensuring stability. 
  • Quorum Nodes: Our new system relies on quorum nodes to reach consensus and maintain consistency, which improves the resiliency and fault tolerance of our services. 
  • AWS Load Balancers: By switching to AWS Load Balancers, we have optimised our load balancing capabilities, ensuring a smooth and responsive experience for you, even during peak usage times. 
  • Global Accelerator IPs: With the implementation of Global Accelerator IPs, we have significantly improved the performance and availability of our services across the globe, delivering a faster and more reliable experience for customers worldwide. 
  • Automatic Scaling: Our clusters can now scale automatically within the given parameters, ensuring that our system remains responsive and performant, even as our customer base grows. 
  • Automated CI/CD: We have integrated automated Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) into our development process, enabling us to deliver new features and improvements more quickly and efficiently. 
  • Consistent Low Latency: We have rigorously tested our new system to ensure it delivers consistent low latency, providing you with a seamless user experience. 
  • Redundancy: To further enhance our system’s resilience, we have increased our investment in our second data centre in the Isle of Man, running on the latest VMware technology. This ensures that our services remain available, even in the event of unforeseen issues. 

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.

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