There's been an elephant in the room during the past few Custom Ink Tech Blog updates. Perhaps it's been alluded to, but we've been consistently putting off addressing it here, simply because of its scale, as well as how many subsequent blog posts could be written wrestling with its implications. (This, of course, means we've also been putting off said subsequent blog posts, because we never got around to writing this one.) So, it's time to rip off the proverbial...
In early 2020, Custom Ink implemented an AWS Application Load Balancer in front of CustomInk.com and decommissioned a set of EC2 instances running an open-source HTTP accelerator called Varnish. This transition was the latest step in our long journey to make CustomInk.com faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain. Read on to see how we used caching and load balancing to make our website more scalable and less complicated, and how we eventually got to use Amazon Web Services' managed...
