A farewell to an old friend...
We’ve finally untangled the brilliant but alarming Reverse Proxy Jordan Worner assembled 5 years ago!
We launched the major RSM Global project nearly 5 years ago – an enormous web presence spanning the ~100 member firms and over 800 offices across the globe, serving many languages and masters with varied and varying content management best practices.
In 2015 when we delivered this project we knew we needed to accommodate a complex pattern of canonical URLs that could deliver duplicate content, translated pages & menus, and landing pages in a way that maximised SEO potential no matter what territory the target audience was viewing the sites from. Accordingly we had to build something we couldn’t just buy in a box on a shelf: a Reverse Proxy that delivered all of the above yet would remain flexible and configurable going forward.
It sits at the centre of the RSM web offering, taking a request for any folder on the platform and deciphering where to fetch that website from, delivering it instantly, on demand to the visitor.
Our Lead Developer at the time, Jordan Worner, built something that has most certainly stood the test of time; it’s not failed once in nearly 5 years BUT it has given us some sleepless nights; it was a single point of failure and a challenge to keep up to date with modern security practices – we worried endlessly about simply ever having to reboot the thing!
Accordingly our DevOps David Matthews has spent the last few months planning and then implementing a new Reverse Proxy via the extraordinary Cloudflare platform that also manages the sites’ firewall and one level of its caching.
Effectively David has, in one fell swoop, delivered far faster site pages, additional security for the platform, and a robust and scalable reverse proxy solution.
That said, we find ourselves oddly solemn and contemplative as we said farewell to the existing Reverse Proxy at 4pm today - a moment where we paused and acknowledged the passing of a scruffy but much appreciated old friend.
