TurnKey

Migrating to Edgio

It is always challenging for enterprise businesses to migrate from their legacy systems. Edgio's incremental migration approach is a boon in this situation—it allowed the TurnKey team to migrate one page at a time, without having to change the underlying architecture.

“With Netlify you have to change how the data flows into your application, so we’d have to build around that which would take time,” Beadles explained. EdgeJS intercepts requests and routes them to either the legacy site or the new site on Edgio, based on the page type.

By gradually migrating parts of the TurnKey website, its developers could continue using the existing infrastructure and data flow of the site, and users could use the same interface unaware of the migration taking place. 

Reducing rework and deploying with confidence 

The TurnKey team was using a deploy pipeline on Jenkins before Edgio, which was slow and unreliable. In order to test any code, it needed to be merged down to a release branch in staging. This left the team no choice but to halt the deploy pipeline from merging any code for testing. 

“We never had complete confidence in what was getting ready to go out in production,” Beadles shared with us, “Edgio removes that mental burden.” Every feature branch automatically generates a URL where product/project managers, QA, and other developers can provide real-time feedback before it’s merged in. This cuts feedback loops to a minimum and helps to avoid wasted work. 

Hank Bowen, the Software Engineer at TurnKey Vacation Rentals, explained that the biggest improvement to the developer experience has been that each developer has the ability to work on their own update, push it to its own branch easily, and get in front of their product team much faster. 

“Edgio allows us to work quickly and independently,” stated Bowen. The technical team at TurnKey can now develop edge rules locally, preview them in pre-production, and promote to production with confidence. The team went from 1-2 deploys a month to scheduled, weekly deploys and the number of rollbacks had to be done after a production deploy has dropped significantly.

Before, TurnKey developers were often sifting through logs on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In the Edgio Application Console, users have a live tail of logs with filtering for each pre-prod URL environment. “In all seriousness, when I saw that we could stream server logs for every deployment, that’s when I said it's this product—no other options.”

Statically prerendering 6,000+ property pages

JAMstack is a new way of building websites. The TurnKey team was looking to bring the benefits of JAMstack to their workflow, which include improved performance, higher security, and a better developer experience.

With an application-aware CDN, Edgio utilizes pre- and just-in-time rendering to cache dynamic data at the edge 95%+ of the time. This is done almost entirely on the CDN, eliminating the server in the delivery process.

“The appeal of JAMstack is speed,” mentioned Beadles. On the platform, TurnKey developers can specify the set of URLs that should be pre-rendered and cached at the edge during deployment to ensure their site is served quickly. This approach saved the team a few weeks of work. Originally, they were going to build a bot to crawl the high-traffic pages and store them in the cache. “With Edgio, you’re able to prime the cache. That was a really big deal to us.”

Edgio's development and deployment process puts developers at the center of the process, giving them the necessary controls while simplifying the maintenance process. Now, all 6,000+ property pages on Turnkeyvr.com are statically pre-rendered to get the speed benefits of a static site for all of its luxurious home properties.

TurnKey customers immediately felt a difference in their user experience, given that their year-over-year growth rate tripled the month after launch.

Edgio's Expert Service Team

The brilliant team at TurnKey has taken advantage of the developer-first features built into the platform and chose the path of self-servicing their migration onto Edgio's application services entirely. They have taken control of their developer experience and created a powerful workflow saving them tremendous time and overhead.

“One of the best parts of working with Edgio's Expert Service team has been the support given. We’re able to ask questions and have knowledgeable people get back to us quickly, who care and want to help us make our product better,” shared Beadles.

At Edgio, we do not win unless our customers do. We know the pain points of eCommerce businesses running dynamic websites and have dedicated teams providing support at any step of the way. Our number one priority is increasing developer velocity and accelerating page loads, and bottom-line growth and reduced DevOps costs are bonus wins.

Edgio Benefits

Edgio is your all-in-one Jamstack platform to develop, deploy, preview, split test and monitor your headless frontend. We help large, dynamic websites deliver sub-500ms median page loads. Join industry leaders, including TurnkeyKey Vacation Rentals, Shoe Carnival, REVOLVE, Sharper Image and many more, feeling the benefits of a simple developer workflow and a sub-second site, running on Edgio's application services.