What platform is Blocks Built on?

Blocks® has been built using the Ruby on Rails web application framework - the same underlying technology that powers the likes of Twitter and yellowpages.com.

Tell me a little about how you developed Blocks?

At BlocksGlobal® our development process revolves around a principle of a conscientious development; in plain terms, this means we care about the quality of our work. To this end, we follow an agile development process with weekly iterations and a test first, BDD (Behavior Driven Development), approach. As a result, our code is covered by a suite of tests numbering in the thousands, giving us strong code coverage and a safe platform from which to add new features.

What about the hardware / architecture?

Making sure we got our architecture right from the start, so it could scale elastically while ensuring the highest standards in data security, system uptime and performance was crucial. 

We started with a Tier 1 data centre and all the inherent security and continuous power that they provide.  On top of this, we have put together an infrastructure that is heavily influenced by the Cloud Computing paradigm, with each client receiving their own dedicated virtual server that seamlessly integrates with the web front end.

The software itself has also been split into two, with the core Blocks® product separated from the system that serves the live websites.  We can therefore manage and scale them independently, allowing us to isolate and optimize the management of things like Content Delivery Networks and DNS Failover.

How do you ensure persistent Uptime?

With a swathe of monitors covering all aspects of our system, most failures are fixed automatically. For those issues that are not we have alert mechanisms, based on both email and SMS messages, so our engineers will be aware of the problem before it becomes an issue.

All this helps us ensure that we provide the highest possible level of uptime.