Ymir Report #8 — Redis, 3000 concurrent WooCommerce load test, CloudFront Functions and more!


Heya friend!

Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.


INTRO

Slight error last report. Was report #7 and not #6. Copy paste fail lol

This has had to be the cycle where I got the most things done since I started doing these reports. I got a lot done on the product side and marketing side. Business has been stable.


PRODUCT

You can always view the history of Ymir's product development at https://ymirapp.com/changelog.

I started the cycle by wrapping up Redis cache cluster support. There's still Redis support in the plugin that's necessary, but the existing WordPress Redis plugin works. That's what we used for the load testing.

Speaking of load testing, me and Julien ran the biggest WooCommerce load test to date! The top test had 3000 people checking out concurrently with a 2 minute ramp up. Lambda handled it perfectly, but there were a few errors in the runtime I'll have to fix.

That said, the conclusion were obvious. Lambda can really scale to absurd levels in seconds. At this point, we're running tests that are 3x larger than the ones that review signal runs for its benchmark tests. (They also ramp up over 40 minutes instead of 2 minutes.)

At the same time, I was also working on CloudFront functions support. If you're familiar with Cloudflare workers, it's the same idea. I managed to wrap it all up from start to finish the same week.

I also added automatic association of a X-Forwarded-Host management function for multidomain environments. This allows you to have a CloudFront do page caching for multisite installations. (This wasn't possible before.) It's live on carlalexander.ca so it can get some sweet sweet 20ms response times.

This was also the first set of features that I built that Vapor doesn't have. I'm happy that I'm getting close to feature parity for the must-have features. I have a lot of cool idea of things I want to do once I reach that point.


MARKETING

Marketing week was also busy this week. I wrapped up the article on serverless architecture and WordPress.

Serverless WordPress architecture on AWS >>

The article did well on social media and Reddit, but I didn't get any new customers from it. This is ok. It's part of my larger evergreen content strategy so I don't expect an immediate return on investment for it. (Although it'd be nice!)

I got the ok for the testimonial so I have a testimonial on the marketing site. Still waiting for a title and picture though to make it better!

I also did some more documentation. It's really never ending work on that front, but I consider it so important to have best-in-class documentation. So I'm just trying to do a bit each cycle.

I also asked Twitter again if anyone had questions. I got some, so I did another Q&A video. I'm really hoping I can keep the momentum going with those.

The only issue with the videos is they take a long time to upload to YouTube. This one took about 3h. Part of the issue is I talk a lot lol. I need to try to make them shorter and do fewer questions. I don't really want to give less detailed answers.

Like last time, if you have questions, you can ask them via email. I'll keep them for the next video.


BUSINESS

You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.

On the business side, I got one other customer this month. So unless I get one today, it'll be net 0 for customers this month. No progress, but no regression either. :)

Carl

Ymir

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