Adaptively Build the IT System with Managed Support

DailySocial is s a tech blog company starting in 2008, DailySocial has been focusing on news publishing that covers Start-Up businesses issues and the post-dotcom bubble before the ‘startup' term became widely known. DailySocial (PT Digital Startup Nusantara) is now considered one of the most reliable news-portal in Indonesia.

Along the way there were many products and services offered by Daily Social as part of their innovation journey. However, during their experimental days some of the products came to face the lock, while other products and services were successfully established and become their signature services until today.

"By the time I joined the DailySocial in 2017, the products were mainly dailysocial.id website and Minerva chatbot, while other microsites and some web-based applications were only client-based projects," said DailySocial team.

Being the technology related news-portal, DailySocial will need to prepare their IT infrastructure properly in order to scale flexibly and to sustain their business growth. While their readers statistics showed that traffic itself did not come from mainstream channel, the non-news articles were also proven to provide effective traffic inbound due to their time-sensitive business nature.

By common, startups like DailySocial are relying on what cloud computing offers, it is to build efficient, flexible yet reliable system.

Reliability became the main concern for DailySocial in order to encourage growth on startups ecosystem in Indonesia to enable market education, discussion, and so forth. As the matter of fact, sluggish infrastructure operations will be unacceptable from business perspective, which will cause lesser traffic or even worse having no access at all to the dailysocial.id website.

Proficient local cloud provider

Most of the skeptical question are whether the local cloud service provider (CSP) could provide the solutions decently, where DailySocial team explained: “These questions of why would a startup be using the local CSP? Our answer will straightforwardly go to the helpful support team who is capable of taking care our technical problems. Previously, we did subscribe to a well-known CSP from China where we faced many miscommunications during the troubleshoot and administration process”

DailySocial team moreover explained, in order to penetrate the local market (Indonesia), it is by nature to get content delivery runs by local CSP to obtain the higher performance.

“Three months after I joined DailySocial as an engineer, that is when we decided to migrate to Biznet Gio due to those critical considerations,” he said.

By working together with Biznet Gio, DailySocial established an architecture consist of four VMs, four private IPs, one public IP as a proxy, and some few ports to run apps and databases. Furthermore, they use multiple platform stacks such as NginX, PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, and NodeJS.

By using proxy methods as a load balancer, DailySocial enables their server workloads to perform faster in an organized traffic allocation. The dailysocial.id website now is capable of serving millions of unique traffic every month.

DailySocial was working closely with the news curators. According to DailySocial team, the inbound traffic coming from that service alone could take around 3000 concurrent traffic into dailysocial.id website that would cause bottleneck problems in the first place.

Interestingly, the three technical man behind DailySocial team were not skilled personnel to deal with DevOps/SysOps, but more on the programming or a front-end engineering side. This was where Biznet Gio support team came to provide guidance and assistance configuring the infrastructure to ensure DailySocial services fully operates by 24/7.

"The support role from Biznet Gio was really helpful for me who does not have any background for managing IT infrastructure, meanwhile along the way I can also learn about one or two new things from the support. For example, we learn a lot whenever doing troubleshoot on the CMS connection to the social media API for publication needs," the DailySocial team explained.

To solve this problem, DailySocial engaged with Biznet Gio support intensively all day long. At some point, Biznet Gio provides extra service by having higher support layer to standby and working with DailySocial team until 2 A.M just to ensure the problem was resolved. According to DailySocial team, they doubt that this type of support is available first-handedly by foreign CSP.

DailySocial team includes the IT division has been expanding aggressively to sustain their business growth. Their cloud architecture grew more complex along with their expansion in order to improve their customer experience level. DailySocial is quite open to pursue any kind of technology stacks, which has been done by adopting several platforms such as Python, Postgre, and enabling the local S3 Storage on NEO Object Storage. In addition to their dailysocial.id website, currently they already published hybrid.id and trikinet.com websites, and also Orchestra innovation program, while more innovative services are expected to come.