Benny Chew discusses his experience as an infrastructure engineer at Adslot, moving through various roles and companies over time. Some key projects involved migrating platforms to improve scalability, availability and reduce costs. This included moving to AWS, implementing continuous integration and delivery processes, consolidating code repositories, and developing new components with newer technologies like Node.js. The goal was to streamline development, deployment and operations across multiple products and teams through automation and a unified approach.

1. Deployment, Maintenance
& Evolution
Benny Chew

2. Brief Background
- BSc (Computer Science & Software Engineering) - 2006
- Infrastructure Engineer at Adslot (subsidiary of Webfirm
Group Ltd)
- Adslot platforms provide self serve sales tools, ad building
and ad serving for publishers
- Current clients - REA Group, Carsales.com,
Realestate.co.nz, SeLoger
- But first, we shall go back in time..

3. QDC
- Startup focused on personalised advertising
- MySQL + Java + Adobe Flash/Flex RIA
- Client-server architecture, with separate backend services
for rendering, distribution, reporting
- Physical windows servers for application/DB
- Linux server for version control (Subversion), wiki/issue
management (Trac)

4. Adlizard
- In print advertising wanting to move to digital
- Simplify personalisation tech we have, just support self
serve banner advertising (ad builder)
- Chance to refactor!

5. Issues and Solutions
- Only part of the old app relevant
-> Extracted decompile/recompile tech, new app wraps
around this core
- Manual cobbling of boilerplate code
-> Automatic code generation from DB schema
- Windows licensing costs
-> Re-tested core tech in Linux, migrated to Ubuntu
Server
- Lack of automated testing/builds
-> Implemented Hudson (Jenkins) to drive ANT tasks
automatically

6. Issues and Solutions
- Obsolete expensive physical hardware,
application availability
-> Architected and implemented on AWS
-> Implemented nginx (reverse proxy), DNS failover
-> Switched file asset management to use S3
- AWS was still only US East, slow asset loads
-> Implemented usage of a CDN with origin server

7. Adslot
- Acquired IP of QDC (Ad builder), Adimise (Ad server) -
combine with its sales platform
- Should present itself as a seamless integrated user
experience
- Here's the tech we ended up with..

8. The List
- Java, C#.NET
- Hibernate, Quartz, NHibernate, Quartz.NET
- Flex, ASP.NET MVC3
- JUnit, xUnit
- ANT / BASH, MSBuild / Rake
- nginx / GlassFish, IIS
- MySQL, MS SQL Server
- Jenkins, TeamCity
- Linux, Windows
- AWS, Ultraserve

9. Issues
- Separate code repositories, wikis, hosting, CI
- Silo-ed development, testing, deploy strategies within
each
division
- No visibility - too many moving parts
- Lack of automation, low level of guarantee of
reproducibility
- Slow turnaround times to support our agile processes

10. Solutions
- Automated all manual tasks used for deployment
- Version controlled all required files
- Consolidated CI - create single point of truth
- Created Adslot's internal PaaS solution
- Consolidated on AWS from development to production
environments
- Switched to GitHub
- Created Adslot's continuous delivery (still evolving)
workflow

12. Adslot Continuous Delivery
- Derived from continuous integration, automated testing
and continuous deployment processes
- Tailored to suit Adslot's version of the agile development
process
- Multiple products, client UAT requirements
- Tech we used for this:
-> Jenkins, Watir, ANT, Rake, makefile, Bash and batch
support scripts, DB migrations

14. Radiator View

15. Then we did more things..
- Developed new lightweight ad server in node.js and redis
(in production)
- Ad builder reworked to use node.js and MongoDB (beta)
- Centralised logging across all products with Graylog2

16. Ending Notes
- Constant learning, monitoring, improvement
- Keep things simple, avoid over engineering

17. Questions?
Benny Chew (Adslot)
http://cardcloud.com/benny