A central website-cluster with TYPO3

Creation and management of a multitude of webpages can be a lot of effort, either in a technical or in an organizational way. The editorial supervision of over forty websites with up to five languages alone can not be done along the way. Solutions that ease those pains on any level are gladly taken. This is one area of application that TYPO3 was designed for.

One TYPO3 instance is enough to serve lots of individual websites. Functionality, content, assets, templates and accounts can easily be shared across pages. And having an underlying architecture including redis and Varnish along with a central backup enable the needed power and security.

In a rather short timeframe, such a webpage cluster was created for ESG Edelmetall-Service GmbH & Co. KG. And with the TYPO3 Long Term Support there is enough planning reliability for future extensions in all directions.

It's a huge challenge for a Content Management System to both serve a page in a performant way and also serving frequently updated content. One perfect example would be precious metal quotes, spread across microsites.

Usually those prices are updated several times a day, with the added option of a manual invalidation in the case market disruptions. Instead of using the TYPO3 Caching Framework for this, invalidating the cache of pages by tags that have to be edited in a special way, we went for a different solution this time: Varnish Edge Side Includes (ESIs).

Having a redis instance with all the latest data already available for other purposes, we use ESIs to enhance the page with those freshest precious metal quotes on every request. Pages are served from the cache as they should but the prices are still up-to-date.

The interaction of TYPO3, redis, Varnish, Solr and several other private microservices has to be reliably reproduced on several servers as well as the local development environment.

Chef has been battle-tested in large corporate environments and can easily be combined with Docker, so every service is cleanly encapsulated and can still be automatically configured and deployed.