Implementation Period: 2008–2010
Project Objective
To develop a resilient, scalable, and manageable IT infrastructure for the media platform Life.ru and its affiliated resources. The architecture needed to support uninterrupted service for over 1,000,000 daily users and enable parallel development across more than 10 product teams.
Project Challenges
- Maintaining high availability and fast load times under millions of daily page views
- Distributing load by region and traffic type
- Centralized management of a microservices architecture
- Implementing CI/CD pipelines for dozens of independently developed services
- Meeting strict requirements for security, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery
Delivered Solutions
Architecture & Scalability
- Designed a fault-tolerant architecture with horizontal scaling and automatic scaling based on performance metrics
- Implemented logical and physical separation into multiple clusters:
- Frontend cluster
- Backend cluster
- Database clusters with replication and sharding
Load Balancing & Regional Distribution
- Configured geographic traffic balancing and network redundancy
- Enabled regional load distribution using DNS routing and Layer 7 load balancers
Containerization & Service Management
- Introduced full containerization of all components using Docker
- Deployed Kubernetes clusters for centralized service orchestration
- Standardized deployments with Helm charts
CI/CD & Automation
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines for 10+ development teams
- Used GitLab CI/CD along with custom shell wrappers
- Automated deployments, rollbacks, and updates
Monitoring & Logging
- Built a 24/7 monitoring and alerting system using Prometheus, Zabbix, and Grafana
- Centralized logging and event tracing with the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)
- Deployed a robust incident tracing and diagnostics system
Security & Reliability
- Established access control policies and role-based permission models
- Ensured data protection through encryption and access controls
- Implemented comprehensive backup and disaster recovery strategies
Integrations
- Integrated external analytics and advertising platforms, including ad networks, Google Analytics, and system trackers
 Results
- Stable performance with 1 million daily users
- Reduced production release times to 1–2 hours, even with 10+ teams working concurrently
- Resilience to traffic spikes and DDoS attacks
- Significant reduction in incidents due to centralized monitoring
- Faster recovery from outages through robust backup and failover systems
Conclusion
The architecture developed for Life.ru enabled the media holding to operate at a national scale, rapidly evolve its digital services, and maintain continuous operation of editorial and advertising platforms. This infrastructure laid a solid foundation for the digital growth of Life.ru and supported seamless scaling to related projects.
