Keeping up with the growth of our consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) is comparable to changing the oil in a car while driving full speed on the freeway. In order to stay ahead of this growth, an incredible amount of time and effort has been invested into overhauling the InstaScreen platform and development practices. We have worked on many different areas, but I will focus on just a few below.
Virtualization
In order to create sustainable growth, we have completely virtualized all of our hardware. Virtualization allows TazWorks to outsource hardware maintenance and focus on what we do best, software. Take a look at the mind blowing 300% growth in servers over the past two years.
Automation
We now have the ability to schedule completely automated releases. This not only removes error prone human processes, but allows us to release frequently by removing the overhead of manual processes. In translation, we can respond to issues faster. The image below shows all of the steps involved in pushing a release out to our production servers. Each of these steps used to be a manual process.
Scalability
Virtualization combined with automation has given us the ability to scale “up” and “out”. To conceptualize scaling up, imagine upgrading your car from a Toyota Corolla to a Ferrari. To conceptualize scaling out, imagine adding more semi-trucks to an already existing fleet.
You can actually see the results of scaling out over the past two weeks. On our primary database server (orange), notice the decrease in read traffic as we have offloaded to our three readers.
Data Redundancy & Disaster Recovery
Tazworks data is securely replicated to multiple zones and regions. There are many safeguards in place to make sure your data is secure and prevent unauthorized access. Firewalls, IP restrictions, country restrictions, MFA, SSL connections via VPN (to name a few). If there is a problem with our primary zone that would normally cause the system to go down, within a matter of minutes, we can automatically switch our primary data connections to a secondary zone, making that zone the new primary or master zone.
To see more in depth information about TazWorks’ technology investments, make sure to attend the 2017 User Group Meeting!
