Deploying Ektron in High Availability Environments

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Deploying Ektron in High Availability Environments

• Created By
• Mark Tobias
• Pantheon
• mark_at_panth.com
• www.panth.com

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What is High Availability?

• High Availability hosting environments are for
  sites and applications deemed mission critical.
  
• These are systems that cannot fail.
• May be judged by
• UPTIME When ivory soap isnt good enough
• PERFORMANCE Web browsing is for people with ADD
• SCALABILITY The Oprah effect

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Considerations

• Three Critical Areas
• DEVELOPMENT Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices
• HARDWARE Architecture and Performance Tuning
• DEPLOYMENT Advice for keeping your sanity

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Where to start

• CONTENT
• (It is a CONTENT Management System after all)
• Considerations
• Static vs. Dynamic
• Taxonomy vs. Meta Tags
• Smart Forms
• Search Requirements
• Update Frequency

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Theyre called SMART Forms for a reason

• Utilize XML and XSLT for your data
  transformations. Let the XSLT do the work for
  you.
• Examples
• Sorting and Grouping based on Meta Data
  information
• Create many-to-many relationships among content
  items
• Enable Taxonomy display when using ContentList or
  ListSummary controls

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Nothing beats cold, hard CACHE

• The single greatest asset to High Availability
  applications is a robust caching strategy.
• Caching uses disk or memory to store data
• Applications read from memory or disk
• Takes advantage of cheap memory
• Frees up database resources

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Caching Methods

• There are many available methods for caching. A
  good caching strategy includes only whats
  needed.
• Ektrons Cache Interval
• Output Caching
• Whole or By Parameter
• Dependencies
• Substitutions
• SQL Cache Invalidation
• NET Pre-compilation
• Stress Testing

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But it was fast in development

• The best designed and coded applications fall
  apart when put into a poorly designed production
  environment
• Architecture
• Load Balanced
• Web Server Farms
• Database Clusters
• Storage Area Network (SAN)
• Edge Caching

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The Nuts and Bolts

• At a minimum, these are the architecture
  components you should consider.
• Load Balanced
• Geographic
• Sticky
• Web Server Farms
• Memory not Processor Intensive
• Performance Tuning
• Database Redundancy
• Failover vs. Clustering
• Replication
• Disk Access

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The Nuts and Bolts (optional)

• If youve got extra money lying around...
• Storage Area Network (SAN)
• Fast I/O access
• Redundancy
• Unlimited Scalability
• Edge Caching
• Move Assets off web servers
• Limit to larger file sizes
• Limit to pages with many assets

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You built it, they came, now what?

• As much effort is needed to maintain a high
  performing site as it takes to build it.
• .Net Pre-compilation for Deployment
• Bulk content loading on non production server
• File replication for asset synchronization
• Plug-ins for static file publication and asset
  location changes
• eSync makes all of this easier