WordPress Site with API Integrations

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It is typically installed in front of any server that speaks HTTP in order to cache the contents.

Varnish Cache is very fast - it typically speeds up delivery of content with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on configured architecture.

Varnish is used by high-profile, high-traffic websites including Wikipedia, online newspaper sites such as The New York Times, The Guardian, social media and content sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Vimeo, and Tumblr.

NGINX is a high-performance HTTP server known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

NGINX powers several high-visibility sites, such as Netflix, Hulu, Pinterest, CloudFlare, Airbnb, WordPress.com, GitHub, SoundCloud, Zynga, Eventbrite, Zappos, MaxCDN and many others.

The Bridge is a micro-service we developed that talks directly to the API and provides data to the website on request.

The Bridge system significantly improved the database response times and also ensured higher stability and security of the system. The data that are pulled from SEDNA API are cached in the cloud database with live calls made only for availability requests - this significantly improved user experience as search results are return within seconds compared to up to 10 minutes of waiting time with the old system.

Sedna is an online booking engine with a REST API interface allowing 3rd party developers to connect and retrieve data from its databases. Sedna's response times were very slow which is why we had to develop the innovative Bridge system in order to cache Sedna's data in another cloud database in order to significantly increase the data retrieval times.

We utilised WordPress CMS for static parts of the website so that the client can take advantage of the easy-to-use CMS whilst providing real-time search and booking capabilities to their users.

A cloud database typically runs on a high-performance high-availability cloud computing platform and are designed with scalability in mind.

We specifically chose cloud database for storing our cached data since cloud databases provide the highest response and retrieval times with allowed us to significantly increase the search results response times and improve user experience whilst being able to scale-up to serve user demand in peak times.

PHP Command Line Interface (PHP CLI) refers to specific usage of PHP in the system command line to run PHP Scripts that aren't on a web server (such as Apache web server or Microsoft IIS). PHP CLI applies all advantages of PHP to shell scripting allowing to create either service side supporting scripts or system application.