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Grinding Gears

Tales of code crunching from the FreeAgent Engineering team

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A brief introduction to ‘the cloud’ and managing infrastructure with code

Posted by David Bloomfield on August 31, 2022

Over the last decade the ‘cloud’ has become increasingly prevalent . A cloud based system allows a  company to flexibly buy servers, storage, networking and various other services that are hosted externally rather than on-site, typically with a programmatic interface to allow large-scale use.  According to a 2019 report, 94% of companies were utilising the cloud in one way or another. The market for cloud providers was valued at $200… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about AWS or cloud resources or Gruntwork or IaC or infrastructure or internship or Terraform or Terragrunt

A 12-step guide to AWS cost optimisation

Posted by Steven Williamson on June 16, 2022

This article outlines the pragmatic approach that we’ve followed here at FreeAgent in our first 18 months of using AWS to increase our cost efficiency. Using this approach, we’ve already cut our AWS spend by 50%, and we estimate we can save another 30% a year by implementing further efficiencies. Here are 12 things we’ve learned along the way. Our strategy 1. Don’t optimise for cost too early We fully… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about AWS or cloud or Cost or DevOps or FinOps or Optimisation

Unpacking Amazon ECS

Posted by Paul Barber on February 22, 2021

The following post is a high-level description of Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Container Service (ECS), the relationship between its components, and how they can be used to deploy a web application. ECS is a fully managed container service. It is akin to Kubernetes, but ultimately it is simpler and has fewer moving parts. ECS offers the security, reliability and scalability that is customary with AWS. The Fargate engine provides a… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about AWS or cloud or containers or ECS or fargate

Moving 100,000 customers from co-lo data centres to the cloud. With zero downtime.

Posted by Olly Headey on December 21, 2020

Running a SaaS app in AWS in 2020 is, in itself, not a particularly remarkable thing. Migrating a complex Rails app that is used daily by over 100,000 customers to an entirely different infrastructure, introducing a new underlying architecture, and doing so without customer downtime, really is something special.  In this article we take a look behind the curtain to see how we achieved this recently at FreeAgent. It's almost… Continue reading

Serverless: From POC to Production

Posted by Paul Barber on December 17, 2019

Building serverless applications means that your developers can focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on-premises.—Amazon Web Services As FreeAgent begins to move to AWS, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of cloud-native technologies such as AWS Lambda. At the beginning of September, one such opportunity presented itself. We decided to create a new serverless… Continue reading

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Head In The Clouds

Posted by Olly Headey on November 6, 2019

Seven years ago we started planning our first major infrastructure migration. Nine months later we made the move, taking FreeAgent from our first home in Rackspace London to a new, co-located home in two data centres (DCs) run by The Bunker. FreeAgent has been happily humming along in Ash and Greenham Common ever since. Co-locating has been a terrific win for us over the years, providing us with a cost-effective,… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about AWS or cloud or hosting or infrastructure

Running a high-availability SaaS infrastructure without breaking the bank

Posted by Olly Headey on February 6, 2017

The cloud is commoditising web application hosting but at FreeAgent we continue to build and manage our own infrastructure, using hand-picked servers, switches and elbow grease. Why we do this is a question I commonly get asked. In this article I'll share our hosting history, how it has evolved over the last ten years, and how we now operate a high-availability SaaS infrastructure on our own hardware without breaking the… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about cloud or hosting or infrastructure

Atlas Probes

Posted by Nathan Howard on January 24, 2014

Last Monday evening we received this tweet: @freeagent your servers are running really slow tonight, making data input a real drag — Warwicka (@Warwicka) January 13, 2014 Naturally we take anything like this seriously so we started digging. First stop was New Relic which shows us average application and browser response times as well as a whole host of other useful metrics. Everthing looked normal. OK, time to hit the… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about monitoring or operations

Going Underground

Posted by Olly Headey on February 7, 2013

Back in the hazy days of last summer we kicked off a project to improve the infrastructure behind FreeAgent, to prepare ourselves for an order of magnitude (or two) of very high growth in the coming years, as well as greatly bolstering our DR capablility. Deciding on a hosting strategy is not simple. Unlike when we first started FreeAgent, today there are a multitude of options: full cloud hosting, fully-managed… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about operations or platform

Bunking off

Posted by Olly Headey on May 21, 2012

The FreeAgent Ops team head off on a two-day road trip this morning as we start the initial phase of our plan to build a new home for FreeAgent, the app. Since the company was initially founded we have hosted FreeAgent with Rackspace UK, on the outskirts of London. Our infrastructure has grown dramatically over the past 18 months as our customer base has rapidly increased. The introduction of our… Continue reading

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