Hey everyone, Kade Drobeck here, CampMinder’s Agile Scrum Master. I just want to a take a moment to offer a brief summary of the projects that CampMinder’s Engineering has undertaken over the last eight months to ensure our company – and our entire community – are ready for the summer blitz from a system performance and stability standpoint.
After we deployed Adult and Family Registration last September, we took a comprehensive audit of what we needed to accomplish to make summer 2018 as smooth as possible for everyone involved (at least from a technology standpoint!).
Here’s what we knocked out:
1.) We switched to a world-class third-party email delivery vendor and removed what had become an antiquated email server. This removed a potential point of failure and dramatically increased our knowledge, capability, and situational awareness of email delivery system-wide.
2.) We dramatically improved our situational awareness by cleaning up dead-code, fixing small but annoying errors, and improving our logging and alerts in specific areas of the system.
3.) We migrated our live and test databases to an upgraded, more modern, more performant version of SQL server AND completed a laundry list of pre-summer database tuning and optimization items – so much so that our live database is the most stable and is more scalable than ever before.
4.) We implemented a dual task processor setup across two services servers, so that our ability to handle heavy load spikes in relation to billing, transaction, and pdf generation requests (among many others) is now an order of magnitude higher than it was last summer.
5.) We drastically improved our deployment toolsets and processes so that our delivery pipeline is fast, agile, and reliable.
6.) We increased our total number of built-out site servers by 25% so that we are more prepared than ever for our increasing number of clients and their parents – hundreds more domains and thousands more families – that will be on the system and using Camp In Touch this summer at any given time.
7.) We are about to complete an effort to automatically spin up AWS photo processing severs during periods of increased CM desktop usage by our clients.
These are just the medium and large technology initiatives we’ve accomplished in the last 8 months. This list doesn’t even include a myriad of smaller technological improvements that have also been done along the way. Nor does it even begin to scratch surface of the business initiatives and feature sets that have been and are being rolled pre-summer with the help of our Product team.
May is now in full swing, which marks the start of the big, crazy summer season, which is why I wanted to give all of you this list. As always, this summer is going to be busy, stressful – and at times frustrating – but our entire system is more prepared, more stable and more performant than has ever been before. I hope that gives each of you more confidence and peace of mind during this wild-ride we’re about to start this summer.
Thank you, each of you, for all you do for this company and our community!