NitroPack improves site speeds for WordPress, WooCommerce, and OpenCart with DigitalOcean Kubernetes

NitroPack is a website performance platform that helps businesses improve their website speeds through features like caching, image optimization, content delivery network (CDN), and more. Customers can install Nitropack quickly and optimize the performance of their websites without knowing how to code, leading to a better customer experience and better business results. They work with several common platforms, including WordPress, WooCommerce, and OpenCart.

NitroPack started in 2012 as a self-hosted solution provided to customers as a plug-in that customers could download and install themselves. As the complexity of the solutions they offered their customers increased, NitroPack shifted more of their offerings to the cloud so that they could run custom software on behalf of their clients.

In 2018, NitroPack built the Software as a Service (SaaS) version of its offerings completely in the cloud.  The platform allows customers to utilize NitroPack’s scanning application that surveys customer sites finding ways to make the site load faster. After NitroPack’s analysis, the platform clones the source code and refactors the code to its fastest version. Then, NitroPack serves the optimized website using standard techniques as well as advanced features like their global CDN, lazy loading, Cache Warmup, WebP, image compression, and more. The site’s optimized resources are served from NitroPack’s cloud, which can reduce infrastructure costs. If customers delete the service, the website reverts to its original state.

The team at NitroPack had been using DigitalOcean for various projects since 2014 and knew it was simple and straightforward to use. As a startup, they were looking for a reliable and cost-effective solution that could scale with them as they grew. They knew DigitalOcean could meet those needs.

Scaling made easy with DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes

NitroPack’s product scans a webpage and applies techniques to solve performance problems using its own programs and logic. The application needs to be able to handle hundreds of requests per second and needs to be able to scale up and down to meet demand seamlessly. Originally, the NitroPack team was managing servers by hand. As a small startup with a lean team, they wanted a solution that would allow them to spend more time developing their product and less time managing infrastructure while still supporting their need to scale. DigitalOcean Kubernetes provides the automated infrastructure they need.

“We chose DigitalOcean Kubernetes because we like simplicity. In the beginning, we had a small team and didn’t have the resources to manage a Kubernetes cluster. We wanted to spend time developing the product instead of managing infrastructure.”—Ivailo Hristov, CTO

NitroPack set up one cluster using a local environment for development featuring over 150 nodes. They use a microservices architecture that automates the delivery of over 120,000 sites with over five million pages—a drastic increase from the 15,000 sites they were servicing in 2020.

“Kubernetes really pays off when you have to scale, we went from optimizing 15,000 sites in 2020 to 120,000 sites in 2022. That requires robust automation.” —Ivailo Hristov, CTO

Nitropack has enabled High Availability (HA) for their DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters to ensure peak performance and reliability. Using the High Availability feature, Nitropack doesn’t worry about losing the control plane under stress like their rapid growth. The architecture sits behind DigitalOcean LoadBalancers, sending 8,000 requests per second to a custom OpenResty proxy that dynamically routes requests to shard or reads Redis. The OpenResty proxy is deployed in its own NameSpace for separation of concerns and is scripted to use Lua instead of NGINX to fit their stack with a backend mostly of NodeJS and PHP for their projects. Relations between optimized files are kept in MySQL and Elastic databases. Their worker nodes consist of Basic Droplets for development purposes and CPU Optimized and Memory Optimized Droplets for their production service. To monitor their entire cluster, they use the two standard open source tools Prometheus and Grafana.

Rapid growth and reliability supported by DigitalOcean

NitroPack is rapidly growing. What began as a team of three has grown to a team of 50. Their customer base continues to grow as well. By the end of 2020, they served 50,000 customers. By the end of 2021, they had more than 100,000, and in early 2022 were serving 130,000 accounts. Their API handles between 700-800 requests per second and works with sites hosted on common platforms such as WordPress, WooCommerce, and OpenCart.

With DigitalOcean’s simple platform and easy-to-use managed solutions, they’re prepared to continue this rapid growth, delivering increased value for their customers through innovative solutions and enhanced features.