CourseMaker Is an Online Course Builder for Technical Makers

In this episode of Running in Production, Chris Samiullah goes over building a video course hosting platform with FastAPI, Strapi and Gatsby. It’s hosted on ECS along with a bunch of AWS resources. It’s been running in production since early 2021.

Chris talks about combining a Gatsby static site with FastAPI, using AWS Fargate, streaming videos with Cloudflare, supporting both Stripe and Paddle, using a bit of Serverless Lambdas and tons more.

Topics Include

• 3:19 – Hiring outside contractors to tackle setting up the infrastructure
• 5:05 – Motivation for choosing Strapi, FastAPI, React, Gatsby and more
• 9:37 – Strapi is being used as a headless CMS for the student watching front-end
• 10:33 – Going over how the student watching experience is set up
• 14:20 – Creating a course preview with Fargate using sub-domains and DNS entries
• 16:35 – A couple Gatsby plugins that helped build the site
• 18:57 – A couple of Python libraries to help build out the FastAPI back-end
• 20:54 – Using Cloudflare for streaming the videos and Shaka as the video player
• 26:39 – Stripe and Paddle are being used to handle payments (including VAT)
• 37:35 – About 20k lines of Python and 10k lines of front-end / React code
• 39:53 – Everything is Dockerized, there’s PostgreSQL and an ALB too
• 43:30 – Using Let’s Encrypt and letting course owners hook up custom domain names
• 45:05 – Reasons for choosing AWS and ECS (hosting is about $100 to $150 a month)
• 51:45 – Having a dev (staging) server and production in different regions
• 53:27 – What it’s like coding things up in development and pushing them to production
• 58:42 – The dev experience for using AWS Lambdas and creating internal tooling
• 1:05:59 – On-boarding new authors (doing something that doesn’t scale but it works now)
• 1:10:33 – A public service announcement about database migrations
• 1:13:13 – FastAPI has been working very nicely
• 1:16:41 – Backing up the database and user generated files
• 1:19:56 – Using Sentry for tracking errors and getting notified over Slack
• 1:25:35 – Best tips? Pick a hosting infrastructure that fits your project
• 1:27:44 – Picking between ECS and EKS was left to the contractor
• 1:30:03 – Check out https://coursemaker.org/, Chris is on Twitter and LinkedIn too

Links

📄 References

• https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/conceptual/how-shadowing-works/
• https://github.com/encode/starlette
• http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

⚙️ Tech Stack

• fastapi →
• python →
• node →
• react →
• acm →
• aws →
• cloudflare →
• cloudfront →
• codedeploy →
• docker →
• ecs →
• fargate →
• github-actions →
• lambda →
• lets-encrypt →
• paddle →
• postgres →
• route53 →
• s3 →
• sentry →
• serverless →
• ses →
• slack →
• static-site →
• stripe →
• terraform →
• uptime-robot →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/strapi/strapi
• https://github.com/sqlalchemy/sqlalchemy
• https://github.com/Delgan/loguru
• https://github.com/docopt/docopt
• https://github.com/google/shaka-player
• https://github.com/iconfinder/pyvat

Support the Show

This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my courses or suggest one to a friend.

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