Saasu Infrastructure Updates and Improvements

Over the past year, Saasu has undergone some major architectural and infrastructure changes, particularly around scalability and redundancy. Saasu is now well placed to easily handle current load and future growth. One piece of this puzzle is the ability to balance customer web traffic across multiple web servers. To do this we use a hardware component known as a load balancer, which spread, or balance, the internet traffic for our service across multiple web servers, thus providing a more robust experience for our customers.

One advantage to this is that we have been able to roll out multiple releases to customers with zero downtime. In the past 2 months, we have been able to release approximately 6 updates to the Saasu web application with in a seamless manner with no interruptions to our customers.

However, load balancers are not without their issues. The worst thing that can happen is that the actual component simply “stops” or crashes with a critical hardware failure. Recently, Saasu experienced some downtime because of such an issue. The load balancer simply crashed and when it was restarted, it crashed and powered itself down. This not only caused customers to not be able access Saasu, but also made it more difficult for our internal staff to diagnose the issue. Our hosting partner Rackspace was quick to diagnose the issue and immediately replaced the unit.

To mitigate this from happening in the future, we are in the process of changing the type of load balancer we are using to a more advanced unit, with redundant service capability. Our Saasu Labs Team are constantly evaluating alternatives to our underlying systems, services and infrastructure to be able to provide the most efficient and cost effective service to its customers, and this will not change.

We look forward to providing consistently superior, cost effective service to our customers now and in the exciting times that lay ahead.