Developing a Corporative Intranet with Plone. By Mauro Lemes da Silva Challenges, problems and strategies to create an Intranet with large access with over 100,000 users. Learn how Nginx, Varnish, Pound and Memcached were crucial to our success.

1. Developing a Corporative Intranet
with Plone
Novembro/2010

2. About me
Mauro Lemes da Silva
Brasília, Brazil
Intranet Project Manager

3. Agenda
The Bank
Why Plone
Our Intranet
Problems faced and solutions found
Architecture

4. Commercial, social development
and savings Brazilian bank

5. 52 Million clients
149 Years old
82 Thousand 37,048
employees Service units
5.564
Present in all Brazilian
municipalities
34.7% Market share savings

6. CAIXA is also working in
the USA, Japan and Venezuela
USA
Jersey City
VENEZUELA JAPAN
Caracas Hamamatsu

7. CAIXA's Tech transactions changes dailly
with highest results shown here
With over 27 million
Monthly Internet Banking
Transactions
With over 89 million
Monthly Teller Machine
Transactions
With over 335 million
Monthly Tansaction
Partner Units

8. CAIXA's Tech Environment
3 Technology Data Center;
1 Certificate Authority Site;
532 Corporative Systems;
8 Mainframes
142 Sun Based Servers – 722 processors;
7.468 X86 Based Servers;
300 TB Storage – Hard disk;
1.164 TB Storage – tapes;
93.607 Workstations;
17.151 Embedded computers;
20.743 Automated Teller Machine;
2.455 Branch;

9. Caixa's Intranet's monthly participation

10. Plone use in Brazil Government
• The use of Plone Software under the Local Brazil
Government is currently growing:
• Intra Governmental Discussion Group
• Various others institutions in the Brazilian Government
use Plone
- More than 30

11. Caixa's previous Intranet
Problems have been solved
with our current continuous
updating

12. Previouslly Caixa's Intranet
• No pattern;
• No governance;
• No database integration;
• Simple demands usually took several weeks
to be implemented.

13. Why Plone?

14. Why Plone?
• Free software;
• Robust;
• Secure;
• Great productivity;
• Buying similar proprietary software licence is
very expensive

15. How much do you think Caixa has saved
until this year by using free software?
✔ 20 million dollars?
✔ 30 million dollars?
✔ More than 40 million dollars?

16. How much do you think Caixa has saved
until this year by using free software?
If you guessed 40 million dollars, you're right!
That's what makes Caixa, the leading South American
Bank, effective and competitive, in the world of
Banking, business, lottery and personal finance.
That's making money by saving it !

17. The Solution

18. The Solution
• Intranet redesign;
• To adopt the Corporative Portal concept;

19. Now, let me present how the Intranet pages looks.
It looks like this:

30. Caixa's Intranet Architecture

31. Actual Architecture

32. Future Architecture

33. Varnish
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for
content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to
other HTTP accelerators, many of which began
life as client-side proxies or origin servers,
Used on our intranet for static content cache.
Delivers 80% from our users access.

34. Nginx
It's a lightweight, high-performance Web
server/reverse proxy and e-mail (IMAP/POP3)
Used on our intranet for:
• Layout images
• CSS
• Javascript
• Flash files
• FLV streaming
• gzip compression

35. Pound
Pound is a lightweight open source reverse
proxy program suitable to be used as a web
server load balancing solution.
Developed by an IT security company, it has a
strong emphasis on security.
Used on our intranet for stick session balancer.

36. Memcached
It's a general-purpose distributed memory
caching system. It is often used to speed up
dynamic database-driven websites by caching
data and objects in RAM to reduce the number
of times an external data source
Used on our intranet for caching the most used
methods or that ones that have a slowly
processing

37. Problems faced
And
Solutions found

38. Problems faced and solutions found
• Local cache using web browser;
• Autenticated Users;

39. Autenticated users
Solution
• Use a Dedicated Server

40. Local cache
Solution
• Varnish implementation.
The images are stored on a server using a domain
created specially for this task

41. Details are everything

42. The "how" details are ...
• To use Zope Component Architecture(ZCA)
for developing applications
• To use memcached
• By using the egg format
• To use AJAX
• To optimize the code for making the page
size smaller

43. And more, "how" details are ...
• To compress javascript and CSS codes
• To use gzip to compress the page
• To study content and application by creating
a large cache identification policy
• Cache policy is alive
• To use Varnish as Cache accelerator

44. First Stress Test
• Using Squid Cache Server
• A simple apache benchmark test (with
anonimous user), with, 100 thousand accesses
and 3 thousand concurrency
• Which results are, 500 requests per second,
that's good

45. Second Stress Test
• Using Varnish Cache Server
• A simple apache benchmark test (with
anonimous user), with, 100 thousand accesses
and 3 thousand concurrency
• Which results are, 9800 requests per second,
that's pretty good.
• This is the “why” reason to use Varnish

46. What does the setup look like?
• Nginx (layout images, video streaming and
access logging)
• Varnish (Caching content)
• Pound (Load balancer)
• Zeo Clients & memcached
• Zeo Server

47. Any Questions?
Mauro Lemes da Silva
mauro.lemes@gmail.com

48. Gracias!
Obrigado!
Thank you!