In this episode of Running in Production, Jerod Santo and Gerhard Lazu go over their news and podcast platform which is using Phoenix and Elixir. It was rewritten in Phoenix back in 2015 and it runs on Linode’s Kubernetes Engine across a 3 node cluster.

Jerod and Gerhard talk about building a context-less Phoenix app, using Turbolinks, caching, transitioning to using Kubernetes, automating as much as possible while focusing on patterns that work for small teams and so much more.

Topics Include

6:06 – Motivation for choosing Phoenix and Elixir
10:34 – The MVP didn’t require too many changes to make it deployable
13:43 – It’s an open source monolithic app in 1 git repo and it doesn’t use contexts
17:35 – Gerhard was happy to see it was a monolithic app when it came to deploying it
21:09 – A few useful libraries that help power the podcast CMS
24:09 – Using embedded schemas for handling email subscription settings
25:19 – Using Docker but Jerod hasn’t gone all-in with it in development
33:47 – It’s mostly server side templates with sprinkles of JavaScript and Turbolinks
37:45 – Choosing not to use Live View because Turbolinks is working at the moment
41:51 – nginx, Linode’s load balancer, Fastly as a CDN and handling metrics
47:42 – Motivation for choosing Linode and using their Kubernetes Engine
54:42 – Serving about 200 requests per minute and how caching is done with ETS
59:54 – Creating very thin wrapper modules for certain libraries when it makes sense
1:02:36 – The deployment process from development to production
1:08:29 – What was it like to transition to using Kubernetes?
1:11:45 – Polling for new versions of the app instead of giving CI the keys to the kingdom
1:13:38 – Dealing with inserting secrets into the app through Kubernetes
1:17:48 – The embodiment of dev and ops working very well together
1:19:01 – Database backups, making small changes and health checks
1:27:43 – Best tips (Jerod)? Team up with people who fill in your knowledge gaps
1:30:16 – Best tips (Gerhard)? Be honest about what you like and enjoy doing
1:31:57 – Gerhard has a personal site, Jerod is on Twitter & check out https://changelog.com/

Links

📄 References

https://twitter.com/adamstac
https://github.com/edeliver/edeliver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hd0FPd47II (3h+ podcast on Changelog’s history)
https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com/blob/master/mix.exs
https://skaffold.dev/
https://changelog.com/posts/why-we-chose-turbolinks
https://changelog.com/posts/the-new-changelog-setup-for-2020
https://www.lastpass.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTt-jdDEWAw (epic Predator handshake scene)
https://github.com/derailed/k9s
https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com

⚙️ Tech Stack

🛠 Libraries Used

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