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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 hello@careervillage.org
• 1:01:04 – CareerVillage.org is on Twitter, facebook and Instagram - so is Jared

Links

📄 References

• https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#Chaos_Monkey

⚙️ Tech Stack

• django →
• python →
• react →
• aws →
• caddy →
• cloudfront →
• docker →
• elasticache →
• env-key →
• jenkins →
• lambda →
• metabase →
• new-relic →
• pagerduty →
• postgres →
• rds →
• redis →
• route53 →
• s3 →
• sentry →
• slack →
• ubuntu →
• webpack →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/celery/celery
• https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework
• https://github.com/Suor/django-cacheops
• https://github.com/benoitc/gunicorn
• https://github.com/PyCQA/flake8
• https://github.com/jazzband/django-debug-toolbar

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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