Moneyspyder and Engineyard make sweet music

At Moneyspyder, we started developing our Ruby on Rails Ecommerce system nearly three years ago. As we progressed through the prototyping stage we recognised that we needed a serious hosting partner who had good Rails experience.

We know we are great when it comes to Ecommerce strategy and Ecommerce technology - our clients tell us! We didn't want to divert our attention away from our core business so we needed a fully outsourced infrastructure team. Someone who could support us. Someone who we could work with to grow our product and share in our success.

There was a clear winner in the market place: Engine Yard.

Read more about our partnership and how we grew as a company on the Engineyard Q & A section.

Finish a great year, start an awesome year!

I've just finished running through our uptime stats from last year and I'm really pleased to see over 99.9% uptime across all our clients - 99.92% to be exact.

There was some unplanned downtime in amongst the planned downtime. This was due to infrastructure issues that thankfully were resolved quickly. I can say with a high degree of certainty that EngineYard did not feature in this unplanned downtime.

Success, of course, is never final. How can we get closer to or achieve 100%? We will continue to use EngineYard and make sure any clients who are not yet EY users, become EY users.

We continue to refine our processes and procedures. The product matures as do all the technologies we use (Ruby on Rails, Sphinx, etc.). We make no room for compromise when it comes to the safety and reliability of our client's online businesses. Really it's quite simple: we strive not to be s**t!

Why EngineYard?

We get frequent questions about our hosting strategy:

• Why not host yourself?
  
• Why host in the US?
  
• What's so good about EngineYard?

Here's a really good interview with Tom (EY CTO) and Lance (EY CEO) discussing the answers to the questions above and more.

A good interview and a great indication as to why we work so closely with EngineYard.

How was your '07 uptime?

Moneyspyder went live with our first clients in June last year. We have maintained our approach of gathering data with regards to client uptime using Site Confidence.

Having returned from my Winter Sun break I can now publish some findings from our data.

Our average uptime across all clients was 99.75% - this equates to 3.6 minutes per day on average of downtime. Our worst weekly uptime was 97.82% (best was obviously 100%!!)

Now, consider the reasons for outages here; typically a large Rails deployment will essentially take down a site for a short period of time. If we take out the periods where deployments were scheduled we see slightly different figures:

Average uptime soars to 99.91% - fractionally more than one minute per day of downtime (mostly scheduled infrastructure work) with a worst uptime of 99.42%.

As you will have seen on our website we gather data, schedule updates and roll out changes based on data on a monthly rolling cycle. Thus, identifying deployments is easy and not just because we maintain deployment audit trails. Business forecasting and scheduling gets easier with the monthly cycle. All those large marketing campaigns leading up to busy periods are 100% safe - any downtime is worked around the main retail peaks including a change freeze if necessary and certainly scheduled out of hours otherwise.

What of the other outages? We've seen a mixture of:

• scheduled infrastructure maintenance (scheduled outside of business hours)


• post deployment issues requiring patches (something we strive to eliminate)


• upstream connectivity issues (new pipes now in use)


• load balancer outages (resolved by Engine Yard)


• mongrels (software component) restarting due to memory leakage (also resolved through new deployment process)

So, I think we have a good basis to build on in terms of reliability. '08 is looking pretty neat already - nearly at the end of Jan and so far we are exceeding last years averages (99.97%).