The challenge
The PlayBac Presse websites were hosted on-premises, with a support contract that delegated part of the infrastructure maintenance to the Data Center vendor. The solution may have looked optimal at first, but multiple issues have arisen in recent years:
- Lack of Availability: The infrastructure was not able to handle the load during high peaks of traffic. The company was therefore unable to promote marketing events that would attract a lot of new users, because the websites became sluggish or even unavailable. Obviously, the impact on reputation was negative.
- Lack of Innovation: Because the servers were managed by an external vendor, it required a long time to upgrade dependencies or install new packages – and in some cases, those proved impossible. This negatively impacted the ability of the engineering team to innovate with the latest available tools and trends.
- Security Concerns: The lack of capability, speed, and agility to update the software layer was a huge concern, since most security patches required days to be applied.
- Expensive and Ineffective Model: Though the solution looked cost-effective at first, the infrastructure was too large most of the time, thus incurring useless expenses while at the same time, not being large enough to handle high peaks of traffic, as mentioned earlier.
- Lack of Infrastructure Culture: Since the infrastructure was a blackbox for the developers, the company had a hard time promoting DevOps culture. As a result, it was hard to automate processes, thus increasing production cycle time, and just as hard to optimize the overall architecture with the best solution.
