Hosting of Zope / Plone applications

Customer

TNO Quality of Life / Arboportaal (see also www.arbo.nl) is an independent network organization, started by the Ministry of Social Affairs. They supply workable, understandable and practical knowledge about working conditions, so both employers and employees efficiently can deal with absence through illness and reintegration. 

Realization

2004

Situation

Arboportaal has an application server Zope and a Content Management System Plone. Due to those two technologies there were several projects both with extern and intern development teams.

Objective

Building a reliable, stable and fast hosting platform for both Zope and Plone websites and applications. Besides Proteon Vital Internet Services was asked to give advice about management, technical support and release management of those applications.

Result

Proteon Vital Internet Services designed, configured and took into production a No Single Point of Failure architecture to guarantee reliability, stability and speed. This means that every component is performed twice if possible, so in case of a failure of one of the components the whole system will continue running. Besides both servers are provide with performance monitoring to detect quickly any problems concerning the performance.

The technical architecture of Arboportaal consists of two shared redundant load balancers and two mirrored application servers. The load balancers are connected to each other in such a way that in case of failure of one of the machines, the other one will take over the performance without notice of the website visitors. The application servers run on the same application to eliminate a single point of failure.

To ensure a smoothly and perfect installation of new releases, Proteon Vital Internet Services deployed, together with the development teams, a Quality Assurance (QAS) environment. Also we developed and implemented a release procedure, which is:

1. Developers change and test the application in the QAS environment
2. The customer tests the application in the QAS environment
3. The customer accepts the new release and approves to take it into production
4. Developers prepare the new release according the fixed agreements
5. Proteon takes the new release into production and is responsible for the technical tests

When the new release will contain a serious problem Proteon is able to install a previous release, due to the clear release procedure.

Conclusion

TNO is ensured of a stable, reliable and fast hosting platform and one partner who monitors the stability and performance of the different applications.