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Running in Production

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4+ y ago 1:01:43

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In this episode of Running in Production, Jared Chung talks about building a community platform with Django and Python. It’s hosted on AWS and has been up and running in production since 2011. The beta version was intially built during a 4 day hackaton.

Jared talks about taking advantage of Django’s batteries included, heavily using Celery / Redis and hosting the main web app on a single EC2 instance. Their AWS bill is roughly $2,500 a month.

Topics Include

3:59 – Building a beta version of the site during a 4 day hackathon
5:38 – Motivation for picking Django and Python
10:11 – Leaning heavily on the built in Django admin and other libraries
12:24 – Mostly server rendered Django templates with a touch of React
16:03 – It’s mostly a monolithic app but it has a few services pulled out
20:54 – PostgreSQL is the main database and Celery / Redis is heavily used
24:58 – gunicorn + Caddy, Route53 for DNS and a load balancer, Docker end to end
27:45 – Tens of thousands of lines of code, ~3,500 files and good test coverage
31:11 – Webpack is being used to handle the front-end assets (SASS and ES6 JS)
34:36 – Static files are cached on CloudFront and in general development is pretty hard
39:07 – RDS is being used and the production web app has 4 vCPUs & 16GB of RAM on EC2
42:46 – New Relic, PagerDuty and Sentry are being used for monitoring and alerts
46:11 – There’s no configuration management tools being used to set up the EC2 server
48:13 – Going from developing a feature to deploying it into production
53:56 – RDS is configured for backups and there’s a lot of backing up in general
55:39 – Storing ~200k questions each having 10-20 DB rows + 120k registered users
56:32 – Their AWS bill fluctuates between $2,000 and $3,000 USD per month
58:29 – Best tips? There’s a lot to learn out there but focus on keeping your users happy
1:00:28 – Want to volunteer? Contact them at [email protected]
1:01:04 – CareerVillage.org is on Twitter, facebook and Instagram - so is Jared

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