On March 16th, 2016 Stars-Insight’s Chinese affiliate community was launched in China. After 2 months of adjusting, translating, and testing, the server installation and configuration directly on site in Mainland China was the final challenge to be mastered.
The biggest problem turned out to be the Chinese governmental firewall, making the internet look like a regulated intranet from a global perspective. Thus in China, for instance, no Google services are available, meaning that for Google Charts (for showing diagrams in reports) and YouTube (for videos) alternatives had to be found and Google’s PageSpeed for faster loading times of websites could not be used.
To ensure a fast and in case of failure reproducible configuration of the server we resorted to Docker as a virtualization technique and in Germany preconfigured container images that later on in China were employed on the server.
