SaaS Database Servers Upgraded for Store Locator Plus®

Posted by lcleveland in Store Locator Plus

Preparations are underway to bring multiple upgrades to the Store Locator Plus® location map and directory services over the next few months.   Part of those preparations include upgrading the underlying architecture that runs our services.   One of the key elements behind our WordPress plugin store, the documentation site, our demo site, and others is the database engine.

Tonight we implemented a database upgrade that improves the security and performance of all Store Locator Plus® services.   This upgrade was required by AWS for all MySQL compatible database installations.   The end-of-life (EOL) was set for February 2023 which was far too close to the “busy season” for many of our Store Locator Plus® SaaS users.

With that in mind we opted to perform the upgrade on August 1st.  This week is typically the slowest traffic week of the entire year, just before thing start to ramp up again for the busy fall and pre-Christmas season.   After a week of testing and analysis, tonight was the night to make it happen.   WIth full backups in place and the failover/recovery nodes on the cluster working as expected, the decision was made to put the latest version of the database engine online.

While a few customers experienced up to 5 minutes of downtime this evening, most customers saw zero downtime as the new version of the database came online and the prior servers were retired.

This is one of many steps we are taking to continue to improve the performance and security of our servers.   For our SaaS platform users it is one more thing we are doing to ensure your map, directory, and location search services remain fast and reliable for years to come.

Over the course of the next month we will continue to improve our infrastructure while the development team works on an improved user experience and additional features for all Store Locator Plus® users.

Thank you for being a Store Locator Plus® customer.

Store Locator Server Upgrade

Posted by lcleveland in MySLP SaaS, Store Locator Plus, WPSLP
Cluster Teamwork

All of the Store Locator Plus® web properties are now living on an updated server cluster.   The new configuration, a load-balanced cluster, will provide zero-downtime maintenance window and faster performance under peak load;  These upgrades will be most noticeable for our SaaS users.

What Changed?

Our prior server configuration used a failover configuration.   In that type of configuration a web server handles 100% of the load and if it fails a second duplicate server that is in standby takes over.  This provides limited downtime with reduced costs; However, it also means there are routine service outages when the underlying software (Operating System, web services, web apps) are updated.

The current configuration, put into place over the weekend with zero downtime, uses a load balanced configuration.  In this configuration two-or-more servers mirror each other and are all online and answering web requests at the same time.  Requests are split between the servers with a goal of maintaining an average load of just under 50%.  This ensures that if one server fails the service stays up-and-running while a replacement server is automatically brought online to assist in web services.

The load balanced cluster also provides an added benefit of horizontal scalability. Failover style server could only be pushed up to a bigger server with more CPUs and RAM and faster network interfaces; a process that meant building ever-bigger servers with higher costs and longer maintenance window downtime.     The load balanced cluster configuration monitors server loads across the cluster and adds a new server automatically at set performance limits.   This ensures that there is a less-than-5-minute response time to adding capacity whenever there is a spike in usage.

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