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The back office

Beyond the development of code, there's the deployment of the result of the code. Again, BullionVault have evolved their approach thanks to not being locked in by proprietary software. Initially, the servers ran the Fedora Core Linux distribution. As time moved on though, Fedora became more experimental, feeding back into Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, but always running ahead. With this in mind, BullionVault moved to CentOS, the Linux distribution which is compiled from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source. This allows the company to use an operating system which is deployed as an enterprise operating system without having to subscribe to Red Hat's subscription offerings, keeping costs closer to zero. The move has also given them a more stable Linux and a more predictable roadmap for operating system deployment.

Infrastructure management also relies on open source. The network is monitored with Nagios, systems are mirrored with Drbd, jobs are scheduled with Quartz, loads are balanced with Heartbeat and the site content is managed with Subversion. With Nagios, BullionVault contributed to the community with patches to add encryption to the Java/Nagios interface.

Alex Edwards, COO of BullionVault Not everything is part of the exchange system though. While the help and support pages are static HTML with Apache Lucene based searching the BullionVault Gold News site is managed using the open source Drupal content management system. Edwards found Drupal "a good balance of open source, easy to set up and straight forward for our human editors", though there have been occasional frustrations with database and formatting problems. Jenkins points to the range of Drupal modules; "I've lost count of the times I've been asked to add a feature to Drupal and found there's already a module to do it for me". Drupal has also allowed them to create fully featured websites "in an afternoon" and then hand these on to someone non-technical to create content and maintain. "Drupal's not perfect", he adds, "I try never to look at the underlying database structure for fear it will haunt me at night - but as techies we can fire & forget and our editors almost never need support."

The front office

BullionVault is very much about allowing clients to do as much as possible online within the exchange system, but there is still a need for direct customer support. The front office doesn't just handle support issues but takes care of the identification and validation needed for a secure system to operate. This means handling documents and spreadsheets from a wide range of customers sent by email. The desktop systems are predominantly Windows, with some Linux based systems in use. Thunderbird is the mail client of choice, running alongside Firefox for web browsing.

For a while, they deployed OpenOffice as the word processing and spreadsheet application, but ran into problems. The wide range of multimedia documents and complex spreadsheets, often produced by Microsoft Office, that the company received were not reliably imported into OpenOffice. In the worst cases, some spreadsheets would crash OpenOffice Calc. As many of the documents were related to authenticating customers, pragmatism has meant that the company has switched to Microsoft Office, at least for the foreseeable future.

One requirement, for security purposes, is the recording of all calls. For this, BullionVault used the Asterisk PBX software; Edwards implemented this using the TrixBox distribution, which bundles Linux, Apache, Asterisk, MySQL and PHP. Trixbox was simpler to set up than assembling their own Asterisk system and is already based on CentOS.

Next: Lessons worth learning

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