FOTOSIK SPEEDS UP WEBSITE OPERATION AND CUTS INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS

CASE STUDY: Fotosik.pl

Faster website operation, easier infrastructure management and, last but not least, reduced infrastructure maintenance costs — the migration of Fotosik.pl to Oktawave helped to achieved all these goals.

Migrating the infrastructure for one of Poland’s biggest image hosting websites was quite a challenge. However, the joined forces of experts from Fotosik.pl and Oktawave completed the task successfully. Fotosik.pl is a website for online storing and sharing of graphic and video files. It is one of the most popular sites of this type in Poland, with hundreds of thousands of users who upload tens of thousands of photos every day.

Registration is not required — the user just needs to visit the website and fill in a form, selecting the image to upload. Still, registration provides numerous benefits, such as the administration panel with a list of uploaded files as well as edition and deletion options. Registered users have access to image viewing statistics, transfer and storage space data and other similar functions.

Registered users also enjoy the options of downloading the image code with just one click and viewing the statistics, file sizes and upload times. They can log in to their account on any computer with an Internet connection, so file uploading and management on holidays or away from home poses no problem.

Piotr Bocheńczak, President of the Management Board, CEO Digital Avenue S.A.

The website publisher is Digital Avenue S.A. — one of the first companies to debut on the NewConnect market (run by the Warsaw Stock Exchange) in August 2007. The company’s aim is to develop and increase the value of its projects by providing content, services, entertainment and new solutions on broadly defined lifestyle websites. The group’s websites already have over 2 million active users — and the number keeps growing. It includes more than 1.2 million of registered users, while the views exceed 40 million.

CHALLENGES

Maintaining the efficient operation of such popular websites requires high financial outlays on the part of Digital Avenue S.A. The previous infrastructure included:

• a load balancer which distributed the traffic across four dedicated instances serving the website,
• 4 database servers, including 2 working in the master/slave model,
• 1 database backup server,
• 1 statistics server,
• 2 servers to generate various photo formats, 15 servers to serve static files (images).

The company aimed at cost reduction but the above structure of dedicated architecture made that impossible. On the contrary, the infrastructure required increasing expenses because Fotosik.pl became more popular every day, forcing regular addition of, among other things, subsequent servers for static files. “It finally became obvious that we had to seek a more flexible solution. Continued investment in dispersed servers made no sense for financial reasons. Therefore, without much consideration, we decided to migrate to the cloud,” Piotr Bocheńczak states.

The company started to search for a cloud provider according to three main criteria:

• cost reduction,
• increase of server performance,
• the ability to increase and decrease the computing power of servers as needed without buying new equipment.

SOLUTIONS

Fotosik.pl chose the solutions offered by Oktawave. Along with great technical parameters, we offered a free test period and free assistance in migrating the old infrastructure to the cloud. Due to the enormous amount of data and high website traffic, we divided the migration process into two main stages:

Stage 1:

• transfer of all static files to the Oktawave infrastructure,
• website reconstruction to enable the “files in the cloud” solution,
• configuration of 5 servers to serve static files.

Stage 2:

• transfer of the website code and databases (300GB of databases alone),
• migration of the entire website to Oktawave.

“We expected overtime work and continuous brainstorming, but we avoided all of that, and the migration process was problem-free. The key factor was the experience both of our team and the assigned Oktawave specialists, who perfectly knew what to do when migrating such extensive infrastructure,” Piotr Bocheńczak comments.

The new infrastructure includes:

• a load balancer which distributes the traffic across two instances serving the website,
• 2 database servers,
• 4 servers to serve static files,
• 2 servers to handle shared drives for the web servers and static files,
• Oktawave Cloud Storage (OCS) to store all the original photos — currently approximately 65 million files and several times more on proxy servers (various photo formats).

BUSINESS BENEFITS

The two biggest benefits from the migration to the Oktawave cloud are: savings and increased service performance for end users. The administrators’ quality of work has also improved. They now praise the intuitive Oktawave admin panel and have quick access to the Oktawave support team.

Infrastructure of any size available on request combined with capacity release allowed Fotosik.pl to focus on improving the existing functionalities and preparing new ones, especially for users professionally involved in photography who use the website for hosting purposes to earn money.

Fotosik.pl is a picture-perfect example of how cloud computing can reduce TCO. The old solution forced us to pay a fixed rate for the servers. Today we pay for the resources we actually use. Consequently, at night, when our users sleep and do not overload the infrastructure, we pay less — and that is the point.

Piotr Bocheńczak, President of the Management Board, CEO Digital Avenue S.A.