Situation

Jellyfish, the world’s biggest boutique agency, whose team of digital experts work in partnership with clients to help them achieve business success, has built and currently manages robust consumer-facing websites that handle millions of visitors per month. These websites are typically hosted on the cloud infrastructure using a high availability configuration designed to maximize traffic and minimize scheduled downtime.

In this particular case, Jellyfish built websites for a leading online university using Sitecore CMS technology on a Microsoft Azure PaaS infrastructure. These sites receive millions of visits every month, so speed, relevance and availability were critical.

Jellyfish initially used the native search platform in Azure, but soon realized it was not the right choice for various reasons. Jellyfish then started looking for an alternate search platform that proved not only reliable, but also highly available with low latency and zero downtime, leading to great performance and support for the Jellyfish-supported websites.

Solution

The Jellyfish team uncovered a crucial need for an open-source solution so that they could have ultimate transparency and maintainability. They quickly settled on Apache Solr for its well-known reliability, responsiveness and compatibility with Sitecore. Jellyfish undertook a trial project with SearchStax, a leading Solr-as-a-Service solution. They also tried additional services, however SearchStax delivered superior performance and support. After months of running in production without issue, the Jellyfish team has been very pleased with their decision.

Results

The results have been great with 100% uptime even during website releases or Solr infrastructure upgrades.