Advancing Complex Web Applications
Objective
On a self-service platform with 24/7 support, the agency can offload its system admin responsibilities and host complex projects without losing fine-grain control over the deployment process.
Introduction
Launched in 2008, Communica is a full-service digital agency that fulfills its 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.
amazee.io collaborated with the digital agency Communica to offer best-in-class efficiency with code management, deployments, and site stability.
Solution
Leverage amazee.io’s managed cloud hosting platform and services.
Background and Goals
Communica has been hosting on internally managed servers or amazee.io cloud hosting competitors for over a decade. 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. As a modern, state-of-the-art hosting platform, Lagoon can run on any infrastructure and collaborates with leading IaaS providers. Given the requirements from Communica, we decided to leverage the services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), as they provide us with 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
- 3x faster deployments
- Can spin up new environments in minutes
- Full-stack visibility
Key Benefits in Detail
Lagoon’s multi-environment setup and use of microservices isolate and protect individual application layers from vulnerabilities across the stack. Communica loves how effortless it is to spin up a new environment and isolate its work. In addition, Lagoon enables service-level logging across Nginx, databases, and Varnish. Having this level of visibility into the entire stack is invaluable as a developer.
Another benefit for Communica is the ease of deployment. 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 simultaneously. 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 unprecedented flexibility in choosing where to deploy. Unlike other major hosting providers, deploying in a specific sequence is not required. Critical bug fixes can be pushed up immediately without jumping 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 24/7/365 chat support. Access to expert support anytime 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