Customers Stories by emind YOUR CLOUD EXPERTS Webydo Moves to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Emind For a Scalable Cloud Overview Webydo linked up with the Emind Cloud Architects in order to construct a scalable cloud infrastructure that will facilitate the growing number of websites created on the Webydo platform. Emind architects fortified the Webydo platform and prepared us for the next generation of cloud computing, says Shmulik Grizim, Webydo s Co-founder and CEO. About Webydo Webydo is a community led platform that enables more than 40K designers to create responsive HTML websites with custom design, pixel-perfect accuracy and friendly built-in CMS, without writing even one line of code. Using Webydo s FREE cloud software designers can build an independent web design business, designing, managing and hosting sophisticated websites for their clients with total creative freedom and independence. Webydo s new scalable deployment with Google Cloud Platform, ensures that each website created by Webydo s 40K designer community will benefit from the best performance in the industry, even as the platform continues growing from 100K websites to beyond 10M websites. "With Google Cloud Platform Webydo s designers are ready to conquer the market and shape a better web for us all. Webydo provides professional designers a full cloud solution where they can design, manage and host websites as well as bill their clients, brand the system as their own, share website designs with their clients, and use an advanced CMS where their client can change, delete or update any element on the websites. For the first time, designers have complete control over the entire website design process and they can build their own independent web design business without hiring developers or manually writing code in a process that is ten times faster and cheaper than manual coding.
Challenges & Solutions Performance and User Experience The demand for Webydo services by professional designers and their clients has been growing exponentially, which has generated the need to provide a durable infrastructure prepared to host and manage millions of websites. Designers, who use Webydo, upload rich media such as videos, images, animation, widgets and a whole slew of other design elements. The ability to scale the system s large capacity ondemand is no easy feat, especially when dealing with highly granular and complex cloud environments. Migrating from the company s VMWare based private cloud to the Google Cloud Platform allows Webydo s service to perform at scale according to the influx of demand. The Solution: Scalable Architecture Webydo s new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) operations enable effortless scaling, ensuring Webydo users, both the designers and their clients, enjoy a rapid desktop-like response time with all of the added benefits of a cloud environment that is available from any screen, any time. Webydo s system has been deployed in a distributed architecture, making the most of the GCP cloud infrastructure across multiple continents, worldwide. Emind s architects have streamlined the service s architecture by decoupling layers that scale linearly, and creating stateless layers that auto-scale according to demand in real-time. This properly loosened the bond between the Webydo sites and their underlying computing resources. The result was the generation of dynamic configuration by integrating Nginx, Lua and Redis, which has proven to provide the most advantageous web server performance. The content was moved from internal storage arrays to Google Cloud Storage, which provides highly available and enhanced performance services. It is then served to the end user through Nginx servers, which handle end user requests, caching and other tiny business logic functions. The newly integrated web server has enabled application forms to be submitted in a scalable fashion. Back-end queues are utilized for asynchronous processing of the application workflow, which are comprised of database storage and email notifications. Additionally, each application server utilizes an asynchronous uploading agent that publishes the website s assets through the Google Cloud Storage API. Web-Scale Security Attacks to the system can cause unplanned outages, therefore the appropriate protection is crucial. As a public mega website which, by nature, deals with great security risks such as DDoS attacks, specific measures would have to be taken in order to safeguard against security vulnerabilities. Moreover, data leakage should be prevented to maintain users privacy and avoid the unauthorized transfer of the websites assets. The Solution: Transparency & Comprehensive Network Protection Emind ensures data security through a number of tactics. The ability to visualize the details of each environment greatly reduces leakage risks. This is done by means of a Nagios based central monitoring system, which provides a visual, real time map of the online operation. The system also contains a log server, which continuously analyzes access logs and generates anomaly-based alerts. On top of that, Google Compute Platform s incredibly flexible firewall simplifies the creation of complex network configurations by tagging either instances, routing rules or firewall rules. Emind s experts have leveraged this outof-the-box private networking capability along with a secure OpenVPN access server, to produce an isolated, secure environment for Webydo within the public cloud. The content was moved from internal storage arrays to Google Cloud Storage, which provides highly available and enhanced performance services.
Challenges & Solutions Continued Business Continuity Designers depend on the Webydo platform to build their businesses. This mission critical aspect of the web service requires it to be reliable and highly available at all times. Maintaining and enhancing existing disaster recovery mechanisms is essential, in addition to creating a robust backup strategy for the rapidly growing amount of data and digital assets. The Solution: High Availability and Continuous Monitoring Disaster Recovery & Backup As a precautionary measure, Emind has set up a number of failsafe courses of action to ensure Webydo s system continuously remains up and running and is not affected by any hardships. First, by leveraging Google Cloud s global presence, the system has been deployed across two regions, eradicating failures. The Windows-based application servers and website services have been balanced across zones while all of the web servers and application servers have been set to active/active mode. Moreover, the system utilizes the Google Cloud Platform VM `Instance Migration` feature, to provide seamless migration or restart of a degraded performance instance. As an additional safety measure, Emind periodically backs up the Redis cluster and MSSQL databases, onto Google Cloud Storage. The data is then spread over multiple regions, which complements Webydo s globally distributed content use case. Moreover, the system leverages Google Cloud Platform s Object Versioning feature, which stores an archive of data that is used to protect accidental deletes or salvage older versions of data. Multi-Tier Monitoring While DR and backup procedures are key features of business continuity, comprehensive monitoring is still in order. Emind provides thorough, real time tracking of Webydo s highly distributed environment under four monitoring layers: 1. Cloud compute, network and storage resources 2. Operating Systems 3. Application Stack Components 4. Application Services This proactive approach to monitoring uses Emind s own system maps to generate clarity and is set up to resolve issues long before a single end user is impacted. The system initiates measurement samples of components from all of the layers mentioned above, and then reports back on the system s overall performance and health. Strict Cost Controls Webydo s migration from a private cloud VMWare environment to the infinite and on-demand cloud alters their IT operations cost models. The cost advantages of public cloud can be maximized if properly controlled. In addition, intricate resources capacity planning, creating transparency and continuously enhancing operational efficiency produced significant challenges. The Solution: On-going Costs Optimization and Control Emind s architects were able to plan the capacity and cost analysis of the new cloud-based deployments with the help of Webydo s estimated demand prediction. The outcome was a fixed plan and forecast based on the architectural changes proven cost savings, which worked out to be far less in comparison to the private cloud hosted annual cost forecast. Emind s implementation of the Google Cloud Platform enabled the constant transparency of computing resource utilization in order to enable the Webydo team with the ability to ensure capacity meets demand at all times. Additionally, the new scalable architecture allowed the team to easily relocate workloads from Windows to Linux-based platforms, which are far more economical in the cloud. Subsequently, the data from the storage hardware was transferred to Google Cloud Storage. The storage migration showed an immediate ROI with instantaneous cost savings. It is important to note that throughout this entire process, performance was not impacted. Multi-Tier Monitoring Emind ensures data security through a number of tactics. The ability to visualize the details of each environment greatly reduces leakage risks.
The Benefits Partnering with Emind has enhanced Webydo s operations and scalability, by means of Google Cloud Platform. As a result, Webydo s online platform has transformed to become even more robust, secure, efficient and scalable than ever before. The past co-located environment lacked the scalability required to handle the large amount of web form submissions. Dividing the system into layers, as a result, generated a simplified environment that now facilitates total management. In addition, the new deployment enables the global distribution of services across multiple continents, as well as comprehensive features such as the innovative DDoS protection. Webydo was able to reduce their annual cloud storage costs by 37% with no upfront payment required. According to Emind s Google Cloud Platform cost estimation, and in comparison to past expenses, Webydo is expected to save approximately 84% on their current storage costs. Moving the storage, network and compute workloads from the colocation based VMWare environment to the Google Cloud Platform has resulted in an inclusive annual costs reduction of 37% plus taking into account the no upfront investments which makes the cloud even more attractive and suitable for a fast growing company. With complete transparency of the environment and the automatic handling of demand, the platform can cope with extreme growth, better satisfying the needs of Webydo s rapidly expanding designer community and their clients. Emind s Cloud Architects worked together with Google and Webydo in order to create the optimal and most efficient road to the cloud, says Lahav Savir, Emind s CEO. Leveraging Google Cloud s great scalability and flexibility, our experts were able to migrate the Webydo environment in a matter of weeks, while maintaining efficiency, scalability and performance that a great online platform such as Webydo requires.
Customers Stories by Emind emind YOUR CLOUD EXPERTS About Emind Emind s broad range of successes in cloud migration and maintenance is what has given our customers faith and confidence in our unique approach to cloud computing. This resilient three-phase method individually caters to any sized company s needs. Through customized architectural design, deployment and integration of applications alongside end-to-end, continuous management, Emind provides the security our customers seek. No matter the size, from startups to small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs), and large-scale enterprises, Emind s experts have the trusted knowledge and experience to support you on your journey to and within the cloud. Founded in 2006, our strong foundation stemmed from a focus on open-source production and has since switched gears to large-scale system design, implementation, deployment and management. The experience gained from these previous areas of expertise has enabled us to successfully aid companies of all sorts and sizes with their migrations to the cloud, maintaining efficiency from the very beginning.