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Ever since Easy Projects‘ inception back in 2004, its core product architecture has stayed relatively the same: Web Server (MS IIS) and Database Server (MS SQL).
When we moved our hosting environment to Microsoft Azure Cloud, we added a few more components to the mix: Redis Cache, Service Bus, Azure Search and others. These technologies allowed Easy Projects to be scaled on demand and to maintain high performance and reliability for thousands of concurrent users.
As the product‘s complexity, along with our team size, have increased, we had to start looking for better ways to manage our development and deployment processes. After several months of intense research and multiple proofs of concept, we settled on the Microservice Architecture.
Microservices – an approach to software development in which a large application is built as a suite of modular services. There are a number of benefits to this approach, including:
- Each service can be developed and deployed independently. It simplifies testing and speeds up the deployment process. Also, product updates can be often pushed without causing any downtime.
- Each service handles a separate small piece of functionality, which makes it easy to modify and maintain for the team and greatly shortens the learning curve for new hires;
- Microservices architecture makes it really easy to scale by adding the required resources just for the specific service;
- Security is increased as the services run independently and a potential issue in one module will be isolated from the rest of the application;
- Microservices boost innovation, by making it easy to try out new concepts, features, and functionality.
Additional reading: Microservices Architecture
Of course, our migration to the Microservices architecture will not happen overnight. It is a work in progress that will span over 6-8 months.
Impact on Hosted Customers
Any client-hosted within our MS Azure environment (public or private cloud) will not experience any impact on their usage of Easy Projects other than improved performance and faster delivery of new features.
Customers running Easy Projects within their own Azure instance will receive assistance from our technical team in installing newly required services for their Azure environment.
Impact on On-premise Customers
Any customer running Easy Projects on their own servers (in-house / on-premise installation) will need to install Docker on their servers. Docker is the enterprise-grade container platform allowing us to run microservice-based cloud applications.
Additional reading: How to deploy Docker on Windows Server
Based on the current timeline we expect that the next Easy Projects on-premise version update, which requires Docker, will happen no earlier than January 2019.
We are excited about these upcoming changes to our technical architecture and all of the new possibilities it brings. Should you have any questions or concerns about these changes – please contact our Customer Success team at [email protected]
