Case Study: Envato
Improving Developer Productivity by 20%
Envato, a rapidly growing Australian company formed in 2006, helps people to 'earn and learn – online' by providing both marketplace and educations sites. The nine Envato marketplaces allow anyone to buy and sell digital goods like WordPress themes, music loops, Adobe After Effects files, flash templates, ebooks and more. The Envato Marketplaces now has over 1 million members. Their second line of business, Tuts+, is a network of educational blogs that help people develop creative professional skills. The Envato Tuts+ tutorials serve up over 18 million pageviews per month. Envato brought New Relic in to help them diagnose and solve performance problems. They quickly discovered the power of real time management and diagnostics allowing them to see performance issues at the most granular level – in both the development of new code but also in detecting and correcting legacy code.
"There's no other tool that's changed the way we work so dramatically. We can now deploy continuously and manage our applications performance in real time. If we write poorly-performing code, New Relic shows us immediately, and points to where we've likely got it wrong."
John Barton
Marketplace Development Manager – Envato
Marketplace Development Manager – Envato
Challenges
- Maintaining high performance across nine marketplaces that run out of the same rails app, with over 1 million members and roughly 30
- Improving stability and performance of their educational WordPress blogs running in a PHP environment
- Responsibilities and expertise of developer and server staff
Solution
- Use New Relic to analyze, track, and manage Marketplace Ruby on Rails app 24x7
- Find and correct performance bottlenecks in both new code and in legacy code
- Use transaction traces to discover problem source
Results
- Reduced costs in server farm by 60% and added ability to accurately plan for capacity as members and transactions increase
- Changed developer culture and definition of 'done' to include owning code throughout the lifecycle
- Significantly improved developer productivity by 20% or more
Environment
Heterogeneous, distributed, Ruby, PHP, spread across private and public cloud services at Rackspace; Solr for search, and MySQL database.
