How GeekWire is serving the latest tech news to 2 million readers worldwide

Each month, up to 2 million people turn to the GeekWire website for the latest news on tech innovation. Now, GeekWire is making news itself by migrating its popular WordPress site to the Microsoft Azure platform. Anticipated benefits include better control and on-demand scalability with a 45 percent reduction in costs.

Keeping up with growth

Started by veteran tech journalists in 2011, GeekWire quickly established a reputation for fast-breaking industry news and expert analysis. A news source for technophiles worldwide, GeekWire is also an avid supporter of the Pacific Northwest tech community, with widely used offerings such as a job board and multiple resources for startups.

As its popularity and site traffic increased, so did performance concerns. “We get 1.5 to 2 million users and more than 3 million page views a month,” says Kevin Lisota, Web Developer at GeekWire. “As a news site, we rely heavily on people visiting us from social media and search engines, where performance is a ranking factor, so we need to deliver content very quickly. It’s a dynamic site and page load times are very important to us.”

Content changes quickly, with GeekWire’s writers publishing between 20 and 30 articles each day. Although there are consistent traffic patterns, with more people accessing the site in the morning, usage can be unpredictable too. “You’ll publish a story that is particularly interesting to the readers, and site traffic can go way up with thousands of visits per minute,” Lisota says. “You need the platform to be able to respond to those sorts of traffic fluctuations.”

Based on open source WordPress software with a MySQL database, the site was hosted by a managed services provider dedicated to WordPress. The arrangement had worked well in the past, but it was time for a different solution. Lisota and his team needed better control and scalability. “As the site traffic and complexity has grown, we ran into challenges including performance issues that were difficult to diagnose and that required calls to our host’s support team. We needed some visibility into the underlying infrastructure and the ability to diagnose and fix issues ourselves.”

Most of all, GeekWire needed a platform that would easily keep up with rapid growth. “We were looking for the ability to scale on the fly with no downtime for our website,” says Lisota. “When we ran into a performance issue and the site stopped responding, we’d have to call support and speak to a salesperson about the next tier, and that’s not what we wanted. For temporary increases in traffic, we want the site to be able to respond on its own and use more resources as needed.”

Gaining fully managed services and better flexibility

GeekWire wanted the best of both worlds: fully managed PaaS services and support for open source software. Lisota says, “We’re using WordPress, and it’s based on a family of open source technologies. It’s simply easier to continue using those technologies than it is to try to retrofit WordPress onto a different platform.”

The company wanted to be able to use best-of-breed Linux-based solutions including NGINX, PHP-FPM, Redis, Docker, and MySQL. When Lisota learned that Microsoft was ready to launch a fully managed service for MySQL databases, moving to Azure made sense. “Azure Database for MySQL was what we were looking for,” he says. “I don’t have to deal with managing any of the details of the database—I don’t have to patch, scale, or back it up and can rely on Microsoft to take care of that part of our infrastructure.”

Scaling on demand and cutting costs

GeekWire would also gain much needed, on-demand scalability. Lisota says, “The biggest Azure Database for MySQL will be to have Microsoft manage and back up that resource for us so that we can focus on other aspects of the site. Plus, we will be able to scale up temporarily as traffic surges and then bring it back down when it is not needed. That’s a big deal for us.”

The new infrastructure includes Docker containers on Azure Linux Virtual Machines, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Content Delivery Network, and Azure Redis Cache. GeekWire took advantage of the opportunity to move its web and application layer to Docker to simplify deployment and management of NGINX and PHP. Container images are stored in Azure Container Registry, making deployments to Azure servers fast and reliable.

GeekWire anticipates moving its Docker container setup to Azure App Service on Linux. Lisota described Azure App Service as “a compelling choice for scaling a WordPress site. It has the right mix of simplicity and control, with easy code deployment, support for Docker containers, and rapid switching between staging and production environments. You can certainly do all that on other cloud providers, but Azure offers it in a neatly prepackaged way.”

“While we like the simplicity of managed services for parts of our platform, a black-box platform as a service doesn’t work for us anymore,” says Lisota. “We’re too big and our site is too sophisticated. With Azure, we can have managed elements mixed with elements that we have more control over. We gain better visibility into performance metrics and can use command-line tools like WP-CLI to manage WordPress ourselves. It’s the right solution for us.”

The decision is already paying off. Lisota reports, “Our page load times are very low, and we're able to do it on a more powerful and scalable infrastructure that costs us 45 percent less.”

Lisota concludes, “Azure should be part of the conversation about hosting WordPress sites. GeekWire is a high-traffic, very dynamic WordPress site successfully running Linux technologies on Azure.”

Learn more about  Microsoft Azure.