Sempernow LLC

We're a web services company specializing in vendor-agnostic architecture and deployment for small enterprises. Our solutions exploit vetted open-source projects while rejecting vendor-proprietary infrastructure (hardware and services). This results in performant, reliable, cost-effective web services that are deployable anywhere. And they're operable cross-vendor concurrently, one of which may be your own rack.

Infra : Vendorless

Too many enterprises get Pied Pipered by cloud vendors into premium platforms and proprietary services. We rather filter out all such offerings, and build upon only the commoditized core (compute units and block storage), building custom services on top of that by leveraging vetted open-source solutions.

Your applications are thereafter deployable at any cloud vendor. No lockin, either to the vendor or us.

Services : Stateless

We build lightning fast servers, each running in a containerized binary; an instance of a self-monitoring service. The service remains up as long as one or more of its instances are functioning.

Fully segregating the application's layers (application, business logic, and storage), services run stateless with respect to client-facing network dynamics. That means resources brought to bear from one moment's load to the next are maximally adapatable, and so per service. Orders-of-magnitude load variations are well serviced, yet minimal load begets minimal resources.

The containers launch into lobotomized environments, nominally rootless, and otherwise have nearly non-existent attack surfaces. Yet much like a war zone, node level security is a failed strategy; perimeter security is what matters. Hardened subnets are your friend. This is our focus. And infrastructure-by-code (CM, CI, CD) eliminates an entire category of disasters across all resources (networks and nodes).

Application Design : Sans Framework

We build applications that are designed to deploy as stateless services, as loosely coupled as is apropos, backed by segregated data stores as necessary. For web-app use cases, we build lean, performant frontends of vanilla ES6; from a subset of Web Standard code that is most-widely adopted.

Freed from having to shoehorn your idea into a known framework and the model upon which it was built, your application starts off with huge advantages; with full-stack deployment and all other enterprise-relevant considerations baked in from the start, rather than hitting each as a cliff enroute. Also, application-specific code tends to be much smaller and performs about a third faster than that built of popular frameworks. Bloated code is progressively taxing on your enterprise.

These practices result in web applications that are installable on all platforms directly from the web, bypassing the vendors' app stores. That is, such applications can't be "canceled" by monopolist gatekeepers. Simply put, this native, modular approach pays dividends in every dimension.

High Availability Data Stores

Object-Relational Database

Our solution is a symmetrical primary-standby arrangement of containerized PostgreSQL servers running under their scheme of Streaming Replication with Replication Slots. The servers themselves are stateless. State is maintained in the peristent data store(s) mounted thereto. The servers listen only to their own private subnet, which is entirely orthogonal to that of its host.

The functional difference between the two server modes is that one (primary) is in read/write mode and the others (standby) are either in hot standby (read-only), or cold. The primary is continuously archiving, while (hot) standby(s) are continuously recovering; both per WAL (file) shipping. Separately, point-in-time recovery (PITR) and cluster backup (base backup) are available ad-hoc, imperatively, while the servers are online. Such functionality is entirely of native PostgreSQL.

Failover is handled by the same operational processes as for backup, maintenance or scaling up, which removes an entire category of unhappy surprises. This solution requires nothing of cloud vendors beyond their commoditized core. All is built from open-source code.

Key-Value Store

Our solution is based on a containerized Redis Sentinal; a self-contained, highly available implementation of that widely adopted open-source project.

Contact

dev@sempernow.com