Introduction

Over the past two months 21YunBox has helped Ethereum's engineering team to launch in China. This article will share how Ethereum China has transformed from an outdated content management system architecture to a modern 21YunBox system with a JAMstack architecture supported by Gatsby and Strapi. After the website went live with 21YunBox, the page load time was reduced by 8x, and the overall development and project launch time was shortened by at least 30%! In addition, the official website of Ethereum China has ranked first in search engines for multiple keywords!

About Ethereum and Ethereum China

Ethereum (Ethereum) is an open source public blockchain platform with smart contract functions. It provides a decentralized Ethereum Virtual Machine through its dedicated cryptocurrency, Ether ("ETH" for short). The idea of Ethereum is to change how apps on the internet work today, awarding users more control by replacing intermediaries with "peer to peer contracts" or "smart contracts".

The concept of Ethereum was first proposed by programmer Vitalik Buterin from 2013 to 2014 after being inspired by Bitcoin. The idea is "the next generation of cryptocurrency and decentralized application platform". Its development began in 2014 through ICO crowdfunding. As of February 2018, Ether is the second-highest cryptocurrency by market value, second only to Bitcoin.

Founded in 2018, Ethereum China is a non-profit community organization dedicated to teaching and promoting the application of Ethereum in Chinese-speaking regions.

Initial Challenges

Slow Performance and Downtime

With the rapid development of the company, its network traffic and content continued to increase. The outdated content management system running on the self-managed small server caused the visitors to browsing the website to freeze. On occasional, they also encounter problems such as downtime. These issues could cause restricted access to company information and impacting the company's reputation with potentially far-reaching effects.

Slow Time-to-Market

The outdated technical architecture resulted in low productivity from the customer's engineering team. The following reasons resulted in the team's performance and productivity issues:

• IT Staff Bottleneck: The customer's server is managed internaly by their operation and maintenance personnel. Whenever the ops team need to launch a new function or version update, they had to coordinate with both engineering and ops teams to implement any changes.

• Limited Resources: The productivity of their team was limited by an archaic and a massive technical structure. The customer had a couple of options to launch their site within China on a local content delivery network (CDN). Option 1: Through their own in-house team that would require alot of effort from the engineering team. Option 2: Pay a high price to a thrid-party provider to manage the system of their behalf.

• Difficulties to Collaborate: Due to the customer's technical architecture, it is difficult to support modern workflows with easy switching between product components. For example, it is difficult for the customer's engineers to allow other team members to easily preview partial code changes mid-work. In most cases, it is difficult to collaborate among multiple teams due to long feedback cycles.

Solution with 21YunBox

In the process of communicating with the customer, their engineering team plans to create a new site and carry out a full technological transformation.

According to the estimation of Li Chao, the technical director of Ethereum China, after the technological transformation the overall website speed can increase by 25%. The basis for the estimation is:

1. By using Gatsby to convert the original dynamic server to a static web page.
2. Using 21YunBox, a web end-to-end deployment platform, can help the ops team to quickly deploy websites to content delivery network (CDN) nodes throughout China.

In the next two months, the customer’s engineering and ops team will implement, using 21YunBox's full capability:

• Content Delivery Network (CDN): 21YunBox’s extremely fast content delivery network (CDN) nodes are distributed in 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities across China, helping customers to serve the entire Chinese user base.

• Continuous Deployment: 21YunBox will automatically pull the latest Git code and automatically construct and deploy it.

• Automatic routing and forwarding: After the Git code is submitted, 21YunBox will automatically adapt the URL of the website without having to coordinate with the customer's operation and maintenance personnel.

• HTTPS Security Certificate: The entire website is equipped with an HTTPS security certificate. This includes secondary subdomains and self-determined domain names. In addition, coordination with customer's operation and maintenance personnel is not required.

• ICP Filing Application: 21YunBox helps customers complete their ICP filing in Mainland China. This allows for their website to be fully legal and complient upon launching in China.

• Hosted Headless CMS: The client chose Strapi as the headless content management system (CMS).

• CMS Collection: 21YunBox provides a solution to integrate a variety of headless content management systems, in which customers can choose a combination of Strapi and Gatsby to meet their needs.

The customer’s engineering and ops team has already observed the agility brought by continuous deployment during the expiration of the integration. At the same time, the access speed in the 21YunBox test environment has also been obvserved to be several times faster than the original setup.

Customer Benefits

Performance Without Overhead

Without the additional use of a third-party content delivery network (CDN), the page load time is 8x faster. In addition, the intuitive architecture, transparent process, seamless integration, and out-of-the-box features in 21YunBox enabled the team to:

• Complete the project in-house without having to outsource to development a company and additional third-party services (additional costs and risks reduced)

• More control. No need to wait for the IT operation and maintenance departments to quickly solve unforseen problems. "Deployment is more intuitive and transparent. From development to being online is now a one-step process" Ethereum Technical Lead-Li Chao

• Agile development. No need to rely on IT operators or DevOps engineers to go online.

Thanks to 21YunBox's continous monitoring of slowdowns or availability issues, the customer's technical team no longer has to worry about performance and high availability.

Accelerated Time-to-Market

21YunBox helps the customer to simplify and speed up the entire process of development, review, and deployment. According to Li Chao's estimation, after using 21YunBox, the overall development and launch time for a new function has been shortened by at least 30%.

This is a practical example how 21YunBox improves the efficiency of launching within a team environment:

Without affecting the online website, how quickly can the team members review and test the recently developed features and versions?

After Li Chao implemented and used 21YunBox, he shared his thoughts:

"In the past, I had to establish a test environment to share with the team or customers. Basically, I couldn't figure out how to do this in less than a few days. Now with 21YunBox, our ops team can complete the deployment and launch of the new version in a few minutes. Honestly, it is very convenient!"

With 21YunBox, the customer’s technical team can complete more tasks, get user feedback faster, and perform product updates and iterations faster. This increased efficiency allows their team to accomplish more than they had ever thought possible, including function in individual environment user testing, A/B testing, etc.

Ranks #1 for Multiple Key Words

The tremendous improvement in website performance has allowed the customer to rank first in China's major search engines with multiple keywords. This improvement resulted in successfully obtaining more organic traffic.

Exceeding Expectations: According to Li Chao: "Our website has been online for less than 12 days in China, and many keywords immediately rushed to first place, which far exceeded my expectations!".
Starting from the inclusion of the customer’s website and domain name, search engines will constantly evaluate the stability, access speed, and credibility of the new website to rank the website.

21YunBox's zero downtime deployment function allows customers' websites to be agile and efficient without reducing the online time of the website. This helped achieve a high online uptime, which is a key factor of search ranking and search engine optimization (SEO).

21YunBox is a Cloud Service Platform based out of Beijing, China. Our services provides you with an easy and budget friendly, end-to-end web platform deployment service for all applications and stacks. No matter your need, we have a flexible solution to assist.

If needed, we also offer full support in obtaining your ICP license which allows you to legally host online content within Mainland China.

See if 21YunBox can help you. Email us to get your Free Consultation with a technical expert 21CloudBox@gmail.com

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