UMW Blogs in the Reclaim Cloud

OG blogging platforms are all the rage!

Some news from the weekend, as has been the case for almost 14 years now—UMW Blogs remains the avant garde of publishing platforms being the first large WordPress Multisite on Reclaim Cloud. The cloud was built for large WordPress instances like this, so I am sure this is just the first of many migrations to come. The site is lightening fast, and Tim changed the database setup from ShardDB to MultiDB, which prevented a bunch of database errors. As a result of the migration, while I cheered Tim on Saturday morning, he showed me a new tool we have access to in the cloud for monitoring site performance called NewRelic, which frames itself as an “observability platform.” Here is a description from the website:

[New Relic] is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. From monoliths to serverless, you can instrument everything, then analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize your entire software stack. All from one place.

Tim was sharing screenshots while working on the migration, and it’s beautiful to be able to  confirm theories that you have about page loading times, server load, resource intensive plugins, etc. with pretty graphs.

According to NewRelic UMW Blogs is fast!

FeedWordPress is the resource hog we always knew it was

It gives this old man hope to see UMW Blogs outperforming itself even when it was just a wee lad, and I think it begs the question of why not make blogging part of your asynchronous strategy, and even add in some syndication given universities are finally realizing that Fall is not happening the way they had hoped and dreamed. You can always “Be There with Blogging,” as Laura Gibbs so astutely points out—a walk she has been blog walking for years now, as have so many great ones at UMW.

So, UMW Blogs running on our Cloud infrastructure is a huge win not only for performance scaling, but we can also start thinking through what fail over between data centers might look like for these environments now that we have a second US-based server coming online sometime this week. What’s more, Tim has been doing some more intense WordPress stress testing of our new Cloud infrastructure that could result in some very exciting possibilities. Things are looking good on the cloud front.