Seesmic server migration

[by Jeremy Vaught, Community Blogger - Seesmic]

This last week, Seesmic completed a server migration.  I tracked down Johann Romefort, the CTO at Seesmic (no easy task!) to fill me in on some of the details of the migration.

What I found out from Johann was that the migration was a significant and rather complicated one, and it not only made changes to how Seesmic works for the end user, it also made changes to how Seesmic works behind scenes.  The behind-the-scenes updates will assist development in the future, as well as keep Seesmic uptime high.

If you are into the technical bits, this has been accomplished by adding several layers of abstraction, and the new architecture, aimed at achieving vertical and horizontal scaling, also enables the Seesmic developers to work in a very loosely coupled way.

Johann continued to explain to me that for the last several months, the Seesmic developers have been learning the 'hotspots' in the software, and eliminating them.  What these changes, and the migration have done for you, is make Seesmic faster, slightly better video quality, and high availability.  The higher availability is achieved now because several servers can go down now, and Seesmic still runs just fine until they come back again.  This is different from before when Seesmic ran on one server.

Seesmic moved to ServePath servers, and from beginning to end, the migration about one month.  Weekends included.  I tried to get Johann to name some developers that did a great job, but he responded, "Everybody did an outstanding job on that, and I must say I m very proud of my team and of their dedication to Seesmic."  This sentiment was also voiced by everyone else at Seesmic.  This developer team is top notch, so expect to see more great things.

So enjoy the new and improved Seesmic.  There are more updates being announces soon!