A great aspect about being a member of the MachineTools.com (MT) development team is the frequency of which we develop new items – such as new modifications and features. Having the opportunity to work with leading technologies while supporting a solid user base gives great meaning to our positions.
As we continue to grow it became evident that our web infrastructure wasn’t able to keep up with our expectations. This led to our decision of moving (migrating) MT to an entirely different infrastructure, one that would allow us to better serve our users. Although very exciting, this is a complex project due to nearly 10 years of legacy code and sensitive data that would have to moved and cloned. Not to mention, along the way taking the time to include several long awaited features. To take it a step further, we also decided to take great measures in improving our web site’s international capabilities.
Without going into technical details, we have made significant improvements and progress. Some may find it interesting to know that we have also made a conversion to open-source software. This has allowed us to build a custom solution with a strong sense of flexibility to fit our needs, such as scaling w/o having to make licensing considerations.
Now perhaps the most complicated aspect of our migration is addressing the question of “when will it be done?”. The most precise answer is “soon”, as soon as we are confident that our application is solid and complete enough to handle a production load. Migrating takes time because it is a very careful and complicated process – not just in the sense of software development, but also subject matter familiarity. When we migrate sections we have to take great care in the preservation of the business logic as well as analyze improvements along the way.
This project has been a mountain of work. And as we continue to climb closer to our goals, it is important that we take the time to ensure that the path we leave behind is solid for our future. This development blog will help us keep you informed with our migration progress. We will continue to post updates and possibly occasional sneak peaks – with the intention of receiving feedback from our users.
Tags: migration, site performance, web 2.0
