Hicomm

Hi End Publishing is the publisher of the monthly HiComm and GoGuide magazines. HiComm is the biggest Bulgarian technology magazine. It has modern style of information presentation – simplified design, colorful and appealing images, textual accents, block-structured content and other contemporary ways of attracting and keeping the reader’s attention. GoGuide is a magazine devoted to the intelligent urban way of life. Uncompromising in its selection, it values readers’ time, suggesting them places and events, which are worth visiting. Both periodicals have strong online presence and are striving to face the increasing number of digital readers.

To answer the expectations of the visitors of their platforms, the magazines have to constantly update to latest front-page layouts and continuously deliver accessible content online. Because of this they need flexible, dependable and modern infrastructure, capable of handling serious loads. They tried to postpone the time for upgrades, but what they have managed to do instead was to find out that their hardware was incapable of running new services, crucial for their business. The outdated hardware brings with itself outdated software which slows down the work of developers and opens security holes. The lack of resources on the other hand means regular downtimes and unavailable websites. All of this was stifling the successful team work of content creators, developers and system administrators.

From the beginning of its work on the project Delta.BG presented a plan for migration to a cloud solution of all virtual machines, servicing the publishing house. Such a move would solve the problem with the outdated hardware and would give the customer the necessary flexibility in system resources. After careful audit of the current systems several infrastructure options were suggested. The cloud solution was chosen as strategically and economically most suitable for the business goals of the customer.

Delta.BG designed and presented a migration project for coordination of all interested parties – the editors of the magazines, the developers and the system administrators, responsible for change and business continuity. The old and the new infrastructure would work for two weeks in parallel to achieve seamless replacement of the different functions old virtual machines were performing. The whole operation was executed seamlessly for the visitors and included update of all operating systems and dependencies, so developers could start building new web-services from day one. System resources were optimized and the security of the applications was enhanced. Statistically optimized corrections of the configurations were set up and automated. The project was conducted in time and according to the defined by the customer quality criteria.

Several months after the migration was over, the developers went on with the long-awaited new design for HiComm, and after its success, moved on with GoGuide. The new underlying infrastructure was already improved enough to allow for smooth rendering of images and content, regardless of the chosen by the developers tool. This helped both developers and editors to unleash their creativity in attracting and keeping readers’ attention and time spent on the sites. While before the migration the downtime for any of the two sites was regular monthly event, after it there was not a single outage. Such availability greatly increases readers and advertisers trust in the magazines and saves unnecessary activities and expenses for the publishing team. The resultant architecture of flexibility and robustness is an excellent answer of the call of the magazines for modernization through technology.