Reliable. Scalable. Evolving.
As a web-based system, the availability and performance of the intelligentgolf system is critical. By leveraging leading web technologies and platforms, and then marrying them with our bespoke internal systems and processes, the intelligentgolf platform delivers high performance for 30,000 unique visitors we see each day.
Used by many of the biggest sites on the Internet, including Facebook, PHP is an Open Source server-side programming language. Installed on two million servers, and powering almost a quarter of a billion websites, continuous development has increased scalability and performance of the language greatly. intelligentgolf uses a bespoke framework to build our sites, rather than any of the commonly used systems, such as Joomla or Wordpress. This gives us ultimate flexibility, security and control of the development of our platform.
Reliable and flexible hosting, with rock solid security infrastructure is key to the performance of intelligentgolf. Using many of the key Amazon Webservices, including EC2, S3, ELB, IAM and Cloudwatch, AWS is a key partner to intelligentgolf, and its technology allows us to dynamically scale the servers that host our system.
Used by Facebook, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia and many of the biggest companies in the world, MySQL is a high performance relational database management system. With many innovative features and high performance replication, we use MySQL as the key data store for our system.
As our demands for faster performance continued to rise, we looked for a high performance caching layer, and turned to Memcached, an open source in-memory cache. With response times into single digit milliseconds, this allows for the fastest performance as part of our overall infrastructure.
With a team of developers constantly refining and innovating intelligentgolf, the ability to exercise sophisticated release control and source code management is critical. Using our own private Git repositories, we typically push code live to our production service around 5 times a day, secure in the knowledge that we can manage conflicts and feature management in a truly flexible manner.
A very lightweight and efficient web server, we moved from Apache to Lighttpd to improve security and performance. Especially designed to support very high loads, and fastcgi offload for PHP with opcode cache support, intelligentgolf at any one time will be running between three and twelve front end lighttpd web servers based on the prevailing traffic and server load.
Providing 24x7 minute by minute granularity of the performance of our services is vital. Pingdom provide our monitoring and alerting service to notify our team instantly should there be any failure in response times from intelligentgolf. With a 99.9% available figure for the last 12 months, Pingdom ensures that if something does go wrong, we can resolve it as soon as possible.