Nicole DeAngelis
|Oct 21, 2019
Oct 21, 2019
|2 min read min read
amazee.io collaborated with the digital agency Communica to offer best-in-class efficiency with code management, deployments, and site stability.
Objective: Offload the agency’s system admin responsibilities and host complex projects without losing fine-grain control over the deployment process on a self-service platform with 24x7 support.
Introduction
Launched in 2008, Communica is a full-service digital agency that fulfills their clients’ business objectives through highly custom solutions using the latest tech. Their work includes digital strategy, UX design, mobile apps, API integrations, migrations, and more.
Solution: Leverage amazee.io’s managed cloud hosting platform and services
Background and goals
For over a decade, Communica has been hosting on internally managed servers or amazee.io cloud hosting competitors. After learning about the advantages offered in Lagoon, our hosting platform underpinned by Docker-based technology, they decided to move their most complex and business-critical applications to amazee.io. Lagoon, as a modern state-of-the-art hosting platform, can run on any infrastructure and is collaborating with the leading IaaS providers. Given the requirements from Communica we decided to leverage the services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), as they provide us the needed high-availability and auto-scaling capabilities
“We build bespoke solutions that would be difficult to run on other providers besides amazee.io. With other hosting platforms, you either fit in their model or not.” — Gareth Hall, Website Architect, Communica.
Lagoon’s Docker-based platform offers the flexibility to host an extensive stack of different technologies in an open-source, developer-driven environment. By leveraging Lagoon and amazee.io’s managed hosting services, Communica has maximum control over its code and deployment processes, resulting in quantifiably faster, smoother releases.
Results:
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3x faster deployments
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Can spin up new environments in minutes
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Full-stack visibility
Key benefits in detail
Lagoon’s multi-environment setup and use of microservices isolates and protects individual layers of the application from vulnerabilities across the stack. Communica loves how remarkably easy it is to spin up a new environment and isolate their work. In addition, Lagoon enables service-level logging across Nginx, databases, and Varnish. As a developer, it is invaluable to have this level of visibility into the entire stack.
The ease of deployments is another benefit for Communica. Complicated decoupled projects require the freedom to share code between projects. These projects have different submodules in git that can be deployed to multiple projects at once. This saves a substantial amount of time and makes deployments considerably easier. Having RocketChat deployment logs is another great perk.
“Zero downtime deployment is a must, but inevitably something will go wrong at some point. Lagoon’s monitoring URLs are a great safeguard against potentially downing the site or app.” — Gareth Hall, Website Architect, Communica
Lastly, Communica has the unprecedented flexibility of choosing where to deploy. There is no requirement to deploy in a specific sequence, unlike with other major hosting providers. This means that critical bug fixes can be pushed up immediately without having to jump through the traditional dev -> test -> live environments. What can take 15 minutes to achieve using another provider takes only 5 minutes in Lagoon.
“Lagoon suited us because we can modify our hosting configurations to fit our unique needs. amazee.io does not force us into a cookie-cutter model.” — Gareth Hall, Website Architect, Communica
Beyond the technical advantages, Lagoon offers amazee.io’s friendly, efficient 24/7 chat support. Having access to expert support at any time of day ensures platform stability and smooth issue resolution.
“Having access to proper DevOps engineers to help solve complex problems is invaluable.” — Gareth Hall, Website Architect, Communica
