DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DataOps
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • Calendar View
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Calendar View
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Content
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Cloud Native Now
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Techstrong TV
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • Sponsor
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • CI/CD
  • Continuous Testing
  • DataOps
  • DevSecOps
  • DevOps Onramp
  • Platform Engineering
  • Sustainability
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • ROELBOB
Hot Topics
  • How to Build Successful DevOps Teams
  • Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
  • Serial Entrepreneur
  • Chronosphere Adds Professional Services to Jumpstart Observability
  • Friend or Foe? ChatGPT's Impact on Open Source Software

Home » Blogs » Enterprise DevOps » DevOps at Longtail UX

DevOps at Longtail UX

Avatar photoBy: Stephen Withers on December 20, 2019 Leave a Comment

Longtail UX is an Australian SaaS startup that boosts traffic to e-commerce sites by automating the selection of relevant long-tail search terms and the creation of custom landing pages for each of those terms.

Recent Posts By Stephen Withers
  • API Security by Design
  • Consider Telemetry When Rearchitecting Applications
  • How To Address DevSecOps Skills Shortages
Avatar photo More from Stephen Withers
Related Posts
  • DevOps at Longtail UX
  • All Day DevOps: DevOps at Massive Scale
  • Red Hat Helps Enterprises Embrace DevOps at Scale with Ansible Tower 3.1
    Related Categories
  • Blogs
  • DevOps Culture
  • DevOps Practice
  • Enterprise DevOps
    Related Topics
  • ansible
  • AWS
  • Longtail UX
  • SaaS
  • Terraform
Show more
Show less

The company has fully embraced the Infrastructure-as-Code approach, according to Troy Jendra, senior systems architect at Longtail UX.

Cloud Native NowSponsorships Available

By using Terraform and Ansible for automation, “we can release whenever we want,” said Jendra. In practice, that can be at intervals between two minutes and as long as necessary at the other extreme.

Jendra said he had not used Ansible before joining Longtail UX. He used Puppet in a previous role, but found it “painful.”

“Ansible was a breath of fresh air,” confessed Jendra. It makes it easier to write configurations, and uses fewer CPU cycles because it does not need to run continuously. He explained that Terraform’s role is to spin up sufficient infrastructure so Ansible can run.

A recent project added support for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters to Longtail UX as part of a push into the Asia market, and that made it necessary to clone part of the infrastructure. Thanks to Ansible and Terraform, that task was easy to perform and completed in just half an hour. Thus, Longtail UX brought the new capability to market more quickly than would otherwise have been possible.

Ansible and Terraform together form “a cornerstone of our disaster recovery plans,” said Jendra. Fully automating recovery to improve on the current worst-case time of a few hours would take more time and effort than justified.

Apart from that, “it’s important to automate as much as we can,” said Andreas Dzumla, Longtail UX co-founder and CEO.

Avoiding Vendor Dependence

Even though Longtail UX runs on AWS, a deliberate decision was taken to avoid the vendor-dependency that would come from using AWS-specific services, such as AWS CloudFormation, in place of Terraform.

For the same reason, the company keeps things as simple as possible and sticks to AWS basics, such as EC2. It has recently started using Spot Instances to reduce the cost of running certain batch processes.

Jendra keeps a watching brief on AWS Lambda, and while the company does not currently have a use case he does see a time when it will jump from EC2 to Lambda.

“We’re pretty locked into AWS,” he admitted. However, the company uses AWS-specific services only where the benefits clearly outweigh the lack of portability. He likened the situation to 1990s attitudes toward using Microsoft-specific technologies.

Growth

The adoption of Kubernetes is not on the cards due to the relatively small size of Longtail UX’s DevOps team.

“We’ve doubled the size of our development team in the last six months,” said Jendra. It now comprises seven developers, a project manager and himself.

Dzumla expects it will double again in the next 12 months.

Jendra predicts that improvements to Longtail UX’s development stack will make it easier to on-board new hires.

“We currently utilize a Vagrant/VirtualBox dev stack (hooked into the aforementioned Ansible configuration), but find that very rough around the edges, and I only see it get worse as more attention is focused on Docker,” said Jendra.

DevOps is a philosophy, not a role, he emphasized. “Either everyone is doing DevOps or it doesn’t work.”

Fortunately, that understanding goes to the top of the company.

“Everyone needs to pitch in,” said Dzumla. “We do a lot of things that haven’t been done before, so we need senior people who don’t merely expect to do what they’re told.”

— Stephen Withers

Filed Under: Blogs, DevOps Culture, DevOps Practice, Enterprise DevOps Tagged With: ansible, AWS, Longtail UX, SaaS, Terraform

« Predictions 2020: Five Real-Time Data Predictions
Predictions 2020: Application Trends, Opportunities and Challenges »

Techstrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

Securing Your Software Supply Chain with JFrog and AWS
Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 1:00 pm EDT
Maximize IT Operations Observability with IBM i Within Splunk
Wednesday, June 7, 2023 - 1:00 pm EDT
Secure Your Container Workloads in Build-Time with Snyk and AWS
Wednesday, June 7, 2023 - 3:00 pm EDT

GET THE TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK

Sponsored Content

PlatformCon 2023: This Year’s Hottest Platform Engineering Event

May 30, 2023 | Karolina Junčytė

The Google Cloud DevOps Awards: Apply Now!

January 10, 2023 | Brenna Washington

Codenotary Extends Dynamic SBOM Reach to Serverless Computing Platforms

December 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard

Why a Low-Code Platform Should Have Pro-Code Capabilities

March 24, 2021 | Andrew Manby

AWS Well-Architected Framework Elevates Agility

December 17, 2020 | JT Giri

Latest from DevOps.com

How to Build Successful DevOps Teams
June 5, 2023 | Mariusz Tomczyk
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
June 5, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Chronosphere Adds Professional Services to Jumpstart Observability
June 2, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Friend or Foe? ChatGPT’s Impact on Open Source Software
June 2, 2023 | Javier Perez
VMware Streamlines IT Management via Cloud Foundation Update
June 2, 2023 | Mike Vizard

TSTV Podcast

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays

Most Read on DevOps.com

No, Dev Jobs Aren’t Dead: AI Means ‘Everyone’s a Programmer’? ¦ Interesting Intel VPUs
June 1, 2023 | Richi Jennings
What Is a Cloud Operations Engineer?
May 30, 2023 | Gilad David Maayan
Forget Change, Embrace Stability
May 31, 2023 | Don Macvittie
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
May 30, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Revolutionizing the Nine Pillars of DevOps With AI-Engineered Tools
June 2, 2023 | Marc Hornbeek
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2023 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.