McLaren Hosting Infrastructure

The challenges

• Migrating multiple web applications from a dedicated based solution to cloud server.
• Designing an infrastructure that works within the hosting provider’s platform.
• Building in flexibility within the infrastructure to allow it to scale with demand around events.

My part in the story

I started by auditing the current infrastructure and the applications running on it and speaking to the rest of the development team to get their opinions. I then proposed a setup and liaised with the hosting partner Rackspace to work it into their platform. I then started to configure servers with Puppet and testing caching and routing setups with Varnish proxy.

The first deadline was to prepare for McLaren’s new F1 car launch which historically causes a huge traffic spike to the McLaren websites. We load-tested the setup to make sure it was capable to taking the strain.

Finally, I worked with the development team for the new 2013 Formula 1 site to make sure their project could launch seamlessly in the new environment.