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Online shopping platform Wanelo brings together more than 10 million registered users and 200,000 stores by allowing shoppers to organize their products the same way Twitter allows users to organize information. As its business took off, Wanelo moved its Ruby on Rails-based social shopping application to the public cloud, and it needed a way to manage configuration for its entire cloud infrastructure. It turned to DevOps and IT automation to help keep pace with the needs of millions of customers.

Wanelo is one of the world’s largest Ruby on Rails applications. Peaking at 200,000 requests per minute, the site supported millions of daily visitors with only one dedicated operations professional and a couple of full stack engineers. Thousands of new users register with Wanelo each day.

The company had moved to the cloud to take advantage of high scalability, high CPU performance, and low cost. Now Wanelo set out to establish a DevOps workflow — without the need for dedicated operations staff — to speed innovation and reduce risk.

"Development wants to push change, but operations is traditionally responsible for minimizing change to production, so these groups have different priorities,” said Wanelo CTO Konstantin Gredeskoul. “As we rolled out our cloud and the business took off, we knew we'd need to avoid such friction to be successful.”

Wanelo deployed the Enterprise Chef IT automation platform to create a disposable and repeatable infrastructure capable of adjusting to changes in user traffic on demand. Using Chef to manage configuration for its entire cloud infrastructure, Wanelo automated configuration of Wanelo’s many public cloud servers, from bare metal to fully provisioned.

Automating configuration across the entire cloud deployment provided Wanelo with a repository of reusable code for everything from bare metal configuration to defining server roles. Coding its infrastructure enabled the company to extend the cloud's benefits and enable efficient collaboration throughout the development lifecycle.

Using an IT automation platform gave Wanelo’s development team a shared blueprint of code for configuring cloud servers across development, test, and production, eliminating the need for dedicated operations staff. Instead, a handful of engineers bridges both development and operations roles, making development teams more self-reliant.

Developers now use automation to deploy needed resources on-demand since the code for doing so is shared, tested, and approved by all stakeholders. Using code to execute infrastructure changes enables Wanelo to be more flexible and adaptive in responding to user traffic fluctuations. Other benefits:

• Automated server configuration reduced resource management from days to minutes.
• Shared code blueprint for configuring infrastructure helps development teams increase development velocity.
• Repository of all changes to infrastructure enables servers to be easily spun up, down, or copied as user demand dictates. 

Through DevOps and automation, Wanelo has realized significantly more business agility while improving system resiliency. Having infrastructure as code enables the company to deliver a highly flexible, easy-to-manage infrastructure for its online shopping community now with the capacity to add millions more members in the future.