UMW Blogs (Fall 2014 Update)

UMW Blogs has undergone many infrastructural changes to help the system scale going forward. At this time there are over 8,912 sites on the system with 11,436 users (of which roughly 1500 are active). DTLT began experimenting with Amazon Web Services as a way to utilize cloud infrastructure to support a system like UMW Blogs this summer and migrated to a virtual server before the start of the semester. As part of this process we moved from a single dedicated server that was tasked with all functions of hosting UMW Blogs to separate smaller virtualized servers on Amazon that manage single processes. Several weeks ago we introduced load balancing into the system, which allows a single server to act as the entry point and distribute traffic to multiple servers based on the load. All files are also stored in the cloud with redundant backups. Not only should the UMW community immediately notice a performance boost, but we’ve also been able to dramatically reduce the cost of maintaining the system and allow for greater flexibility to scale up or down in the future alongside demand. With any change comes growing pains and times where things don’t work exactly as we expect so we appreciate the patience of everyone as we’ve worked to put this in place. At this time if there are any issues persisting please send us an email at support@umwblogs.org so we can address them.