Technical overview: how Organic works
A peek under the hood for technical leaders working with high-traffic websites.
The Organic SaaS Platform includes products mapped to specific business needs, a shared component library, and a headless frontend consumer experience architecture. Everything is driven by publisher-owned first-party data, which powers integrations and analytics and is stored securely in our clients’ data warehouses.
The Organic platform is a React/Next.js project with a GraphQL API connected to a Django (Postgres) backend deployed on AWS RDS, with Google BigQuery acting as the data warehouse.
We use Docker and Kubernetes (via AWS EKS) for containerization and orchestration and Celery for running asynchronous tasks. We use Sentry and Datadog for monitoring, and write tests primarily with pytest, Jest, and Selenium.
The Organic SDK is a JavaScript snippet that loads bundled dependencies based on the browser (i.e., module vs. no-module) and client config (e.g., which client apps are enabled). It also logs events from Fastly to BigQuery to be processed for use in the Organic platform.
Organic’s content management system, Organic CMS, is built on top of WordPress and has five major components:
How everything connects.
A thousand-foot view of our technical interactions
”Organic CMS allowed us to skip a bunch of steps, and really, really focus on the user. The best part of working on Saveur was that we could just focus on the UI, and just focus on the interactions—the little animations here and there that usually get pushed out. Organic opened the door for us and it's why the project took just a month: because we could just focus on the fun stuff.
Greg AllenCEO at First & Third
Organic’s architecture and workflows grant autonomy to client engineers and contributors while preserving the stability of site’s content and user experience.
External engineers receive access to site-specific repositories in order to make business-specific frontend and backend changes, such as special blocks, widgets and custom promotional touts. With Organic‘s architecture, site-specific changes can be released in accordance with each client’s specific timelines and approval processes.
Any domain fully integrated with Organic (including the headless backend and DevOps management) has a site-specific Github repository for backend and frontend development. In addition, enterprise clients may have access to an additional backend plugin repository that impacts more than one domain across their business (commonly referred to as an “organization” repository).
Requests for changes to the core Organic CMS codebase (the organic-content repository) may be submitted to Organic for review and approval. It is recommended that contributors propose these changes to Organic before beginning development work to obtain preliminary concept approval.
Keeping an eye on what’s important.
Organic monitors all hosted sites for uptime, performance, and other metrics.
Organic uses AWS Cloudwatch Alarms to monitor critical AWS resources like RDS, Elasticache instances, and SES reputation. Organic tracks the following metrics:
AWS notifies Organic engineers and product managers via Slack for immediate investigation if any metric hits a specified threshold.
Organic-hosted sites have more than 99.999% uptime. We use Pingdom to monitor uptime for all hosted production sites, focusing on homepages, sitemap pages, and other critical content.
Pingdom sends health check requests every minute to monitored URLs and waits 30 seconds for a response of 200 OK. If this response is not received, Pingdom sends a notification to PagerDuty. PagerDuty notifies Organic engineers and product managers via Slack and Organic’s 24/7/365 on-call engineering team by phone to facilitate prompt investigations.
Organic uses Datadog for APM and infrastructure monitoring. The Datadog agent is installed on every EC2 host on staging and production EKS clusters. The Datadog agent collects the infrastructure data about CPU, memory, and free disk space, per every host. Organic monitors for the following scenarios:
Organic installs Datadog packages on a code level to track application performance like database queries, code-level calls latency, requests to third-party services, dependencies, and other health metrics.
Organic uses Sentry to track application errors for hosted sites. Sentry packages are installed on a code level and send error details to the Sentry dashboard. If any error fits the specified alert rules, Organic engineers and product managers are notified via Slack for investigation.
Organic maintains its own tools to monitor other critical site functionality, including:
Robots.txt changes:
If changes are made to robots.txt files, a PagerDuty alert is generated.
Failed cron jobs:
Organic tracks failed Kubernetes CronJobs in production and staging clusters every five minutes.
WordPress Post modified date alerts:
If any WordPress post date was modified programmatically, an alert will be sent to the Organic engineering team via Slack.
Organic is committed to helping publishers reduce technology friction so you can focus on growing your business. Let our team be an extension of yours.
In addition to building amazing software for publishers, we offer a variety of additional services, including:
”When I acquired SAVEUR in 2023, I chose Organic to power our CMS, ads, and affiliate marketing. Organic’s tech and top-notch support program allow me to focus on the work I truly love: creating transportive food and travel content for our readers.
Kat CraddockCEO and Editor-in-Chief at Saveur
Organic uses AWS and Fastly as Cloud Web hosting and CDN solutions, both of which promise at least 99.999% uptime scores. Organic-hosted sites perform at this rate, as measured by Pingdom.
Organic provides security features such as Web Application Firewall, DDOS protection, and Vulnerabilities Scanning. For a full account of Organic’s security features, contact Customer Support.
Organic-hosted sites have more than 99.999% uptime with only a few minutes outage per year.
Every day.
Organic’s internal alert system allows us to respond immediately in the event of an outage.
Organic uses AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service; customer applications (e.g. sites and related services) work in isolated Docker containers.
Yes, it is possible to scale up or down resources based on client requests. When responding to requests to scale up or down, Organic may recommend optimizations that will more effectively address the underlying reason why such a request was made. The Organic DevOps team configures the infrastructure to optimize speed, performance, and cost values to ensure site and application performance. Organic’s hosting solutions allow for almost infinite scalability in terms of CPU/RAM, traffic, and storage to be able to handle sites of all sizes.
Yes, Organic offers 24-hour monitoring, with an alerts ecosystem using Pingdom, PagerDuty, Sentry, DataDog, and AWS Cloudwatch.
We do a production database backup every night around 1 a.m. UTC, and all backups are stored in S3.
Namecheap is our registrar.
