During my delicious experience in iSolutions in the last few years, I met many professionals with unique skills and a very high degree of knowledge compared to the current players in their market. I can flatter them and say “their” since I’m just a contractor with the goal of bringing from outside knowledge and innovation spirit in the company, among others.
Despite nowadays there are so many blogs and so much content in the Internet (and another yet blog could sound unfamiliar) we decided (this time “we”) to kick off this place to share our thoughts around technologies we are using.
in this first post, I’m just telling you how this blog is made, form an high level point of view.
- Blog engine: WordPress. It’s the most natural choice to make a quick start without thinking to every aspect we need to address. We also know WordPress is, as it is the most used engine in the world, the most hackered one too. We know it and we are prepared.
- Runtime: IIS… but.. who cares? We are using Azure and App Service to host this. This means we are Platform-as-a-Service with a fully managed solution. We do not want to manually deal with servers and configuration for a blog. We don’t want to patch anything by ourselves (we want to focus our effort on the business) and I’m personally very enthusiast of PaaS.
- Database: the natural database of a WordPress instance is MySQL, and this one is not an exception. However, to avoid to deal with a MySQL server maintenance we used a containerized version embedded in App Service. The MySQL service is now running in the same container as WordPress, with persistence on a remote storage, obviously. This is not the perfect fit for performance, we know. In case we are competing with the bigger ones, we will scale.
- Authentication: new users cannot register, unfortunately. To provide external user contribution we are delivering an integration with external services, if someone is interested into, in the future. At the time being, we setup the Azure AD integration to reuse our corporate identities. The plugin is available here (https://github.com/psignoret/aad-sso-wordpress).
- Mailing: in case we need to send emails, we integrated SendGrid (available on the Azure Marketplace) and through the WordPress plugin available here (https://wordpress.org/plugins/sendgrid-email-delivery-simplified/)
- Privacy and cookie: at this time we don’t want your data, but since we want (in the near future) to integrate Google Tag Manager and Azure Application Insights to catch some statistics, we used this plugin to be compliant with the laws (http://www.dfactory.eu/plugins/cookie-notice/)
In the next post we are probably talking about SQL Server, one of the most used and known technology here in iSolutions. Thanks for reading!