It has been a long and exciting journey since we started building EDMdesigner back in 2013. The system was first built on Nodejitsu’s infrastructure, but we moved to Amazon, due to repeated issues at Nodejitsu. In the last couple of months we have been working on a new release which enjoys all the benefits of Amazon’s global infrastructure.
Result: Robust API, Super Fast Loading!
EDMdesigner API get’s more robust with the new version, since we built in a failover mechanism into the system. If one API endpoint is not reachable, the system will instantly switch to another endpoint (from api-a.edmdesigner.com, to api-b.edmdesigner.com, etc.). Users won’t notice a thing, they will still be able to use the fully functional system all over the globe.
The next step in our infrastructural improvements is to implement autoscaling to all of the endpoints. It means that the system will automatically handle the launch of new server instances if required. This way we’ll be able to serve hundreds of thousand or millions of user globally without having huge headaches. The autoscaling is still under development, but the failover mechanism will be released soon to all of our users.
The other benefit of the CDN based system, that the editor interface gets much faster for our users all over the globe. We placed every content possible to Amazon CloudFront – not only images, but program versions, HTML snippets and CSS as well. This content is cached to so called Edge Locations, so when you load the editor, your browser will automatically reach out to the closest location – and load faster than ever before. Please see the image below for a detailed list of Amazon’s Edge Locations:
Image source: Amazon.com
Release Schedule
EDMdesigner APP (app.edmdesigner.com) will switch to the new infrastructure this weekend (May 16-17), so the APP won’t be reachable for a while, since we have to migrate the database as well. Sorry for this inconvenience for all of our APP users, but we do it for you. Note: integration partners don’t have to worry the API will work smoothly!
The next step will be to release a new version of our Responsive Email Editor Plugin for Interspire (v 1.4), which uses the new infrastructure as well.
The shift from the old API to the new one will be a long process. We will publish the documentation, new tutorial blog posts and code examples to Github about the integration of the CDN based version in June/July. After that all of our existing (and future) partners will be able to do the integration with the CDN based API version. When all of our partners and Interspire users switched to the new version we will stop the old API. Our existing partners don’t have to worry, they will only need to make minor changes on their existing integrations.
We would like to thank all of our users and integration partners for being with us, and being patient in case issues happened. We are building a robust, global infrastructure for EDMdesigner to make our service reliable, accessible and enjoyable all over the globe.
