Over the past two months, 21YunBox has helped Ethereum’s engineering team to launch in China. This article will share how Ethereum China has transformed from an outdated content management system to a modern JAMstack architecture supported by Gatsby and Strapi supported hosted with 21YunBox.
After the website went live with 21YunBox, the page load time were reduced by 8x, and the overall development and project launch time was shortened by at least 30%! In addition, the official website of Ethereum China has ranked first in search engines for multiple keywords!
About Ethereum and Ethereum China
Ethereum (Ethereum) is an open-source public blockchain platform with smart contract functions. It provides a decentralized Ethereum Virtual Machine through its dedicated cryptocurrency, Ether (“ETH” for short). The idea of Ethereum is to change how apps on the internet work today, awarding users more control by replacing intermediaries with “peer-to-peer contracts” or “smart contracts”.
The concept of Ethereum was first proposed by programmer Vitalik Buterin from 2013 to 2014 after being inspired by Bitcoin. The idea is “the next generation of cryptocurrency and decentralized application platform”. Its development began in 2014 through ICO crowdfunding. As of February 2018, Ether is the second-highest cryptocurrency by market value, second only to Bitcoin.
Founded in 2018, Ethereum China is a non-profit community organization dedicated to teaching and promoting the application of Ethereum in Chinese-speaking regions.
Challenges
Slow Performance and Downtime
With the rapid growth of the company, its network traffic and content continued to increase. The outdated content management system running on a small self-managed server caused the visitors to browse the website to freeze. Occasionally, they also encounter downtime issues. These issues could restrict access to company information and have a long-lasting impact on the company’s reputation.
Slow Time-to-Market
The outdated architecture resulted in low productivity from the customer’s engineering team. The following reasons resulted in the team’s performance and productivity issues:
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IT Staff Bottleneck: The customer’s server is managed internally by their operation and maintenance personnel. Whenever the ops team need to launch a new function or version update, they had to coordinate with both engineering and ops teams to implement any changes.
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Limited Resources: The productivity of the customer’s team was limited by the old and huge architecture. For Example: If the customer needs to deploy Ethereum China’s site on the content delivery networks (CDN) through their own team, it is a lot of effort for the ops engineers, or it may cost a high price to find a third-party provider to achieve.
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Multi-Team Collaboration Struggles: Due to the customer’s technical architecture, it was difficult to support modern workflows. For example, it was difficult for the customer’s engineers to give access to other team members to easily preview partial code/content changes mid-work. In most cases, it is difficult to collaborate with multiple teams due to long feedback cycles.
Solution
In the process of communicating with the customer, their engineering team planed to create a new site and carry out a full technological transformation with a modern solution.
According to Li Chao, the technical director of Ethereum China, after the technological transformation, the overall website speed would increase by 25%. The basis for the estimate was:
- Using Gatsby to convert the original dynamic server to a static web page.
- Using 21YunBox, a web end-to-end deployment platform would help the ops team to quickly deploy websites to content delivery network (CDN) nodes throughout China.
Over the next couple of months, the customer’s engineering and ops team will implement, using 21YunBox’s full capability:
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Content Delivery Network (CDN): 21YunBox’s extremely fast content delivery network (CDN) nodes are distributed in 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities across China, helping customers to serve the entire Chinese user base.
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Continuous Deployment: 21YunBox will automatically pull the latest Git code and automatically construct and deploy it.
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Automatic routing and forwarding: After the Git code is submitted, 21YunBox will automatically adapt the URL of the website without having to coordinate with the customer’s operation and maintenance personnel.
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HTTPS Security Certificate: The entire website is equipped with an HTTPS security certificate. This includes secondary subdomains and self-determined domain names. In addition, coordination with customer’s operation and maintenance personnel is not required.
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ICP Filing: 21YunBox helps customers complete their ICP filing in Mainland China. This allows for their website to be fully in legal compliance upon launching in China.
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Host Headless CMS: The client chose Strapi as the headless content management system (CMS).
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CMS Collection: 21YunBox provides a solution to integrate a variety of headless content management systems, in which customers can choose a combination of Strapi and Gatsby to meet their needs.
The customer’s engineering and ops team has already observed the agility brought by continuous deployment during the expiration of the integration. At the same time, the access speed in the 21YunBox test environment has also been noticed to be several times faster than the original setup.
Customer Benefits
Empowering the Engineering Team
Without the additional use of a third-party content delivery network (CDN), the page load time is 8x faster. In addition, the intuitive architecture, transparent process, seamless integration, and out-of-the-box features in 21YunBox enabled the team to:
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Complete the project in-house without having to outsource to development a company and additional third-party services (additional costs and risks reduced)
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More control. No need to wait for the IT technicians and maintenance departments. Now they can quickly solve any problem. “Deployment is more intuitive and transparent. From development to online is now a one-step process” Ethereum Technical Lead-Li Chao
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Agile development. No need to rely on IT technicians or DevOps engineers to go online.
Thanks to 21YunBox’s continuous monitoring of slowdowns and availability issues, the customer’s technical team no longer has to worry about performance and high availability.
Speed-Up Time-to-Market
21YunBox helped the customer to simplify and speed up the entire process of development, review, and deployment. According to Li Chao’s estimation, after using 21YunBox, the overall development and launch time for a new function has been shortened by at least 30%.
This is a practical example of how 21YunBox improves the efficiency of launching within a team environment:
Without affecting the live website, how quickly can the team members review and test recent content changes and updates?
With 21YunBox, the customer’s tech team can complete more tasks, get user feedback faster, and perform product updates and iterations faster. This increased efficiency allows their team to accomplish more than they had ever thought possible, including function in individual environment user testing, A/B testing, etc.
Top Rankings for Multiple Key Words
The tremendous improvement in website performance has allowed the customer to rank first in China’s major search engines with multiple keywords. This improvement resulted in successfully obtaining more organic traffic.
Exceeding Expectations: Starting from the launch of the customer’s website and domain name, search engines will constantly evaluate the stability, access speed, and credibility of the new website to rank the website.
21YunBox’s zero downtime deployment function allows for the customer’s website to be agile and efficient without reducing the online time of the website. This helped achieve a high online uptime, which is a key factor of search ranking and search engine optimization (SEO).
