Paparazzi Accessories Is an E-commerce Store That Sells Jewelry

In this episode of Running in Production, Dan Purcell goes over building an e-commerce store with Django that processes up to 3,000 orders per second. It’s running on 12+ web servers on DigitalOcean and the site has been up and running since 2014.

Dan covers building an API backed app with Vue on the front-end, handling thousands of concurrent websocket connections, using Authorize.Net for payments and deploying to a bunch of web servers that are managed by Ansible with Fabric.

Topics Include

• 3:49 – Motivation for using Django and Python
• 8:13 – It’s a monolithic app with about a dozen Django apps using Vue on the front-end
• 11:42 – Challenges of dealing with thousands of concurrent sales
• 17:01 – Using Celery, Redis and 4 beefy PostgreSQL servers that are replicated
• 19:50 – Managing suspicious login attempts and using Slack for important notifications
• 22:02 – Running 3 nginx servers and using Sentry for exception tracking
• 24:02 – DigitalOcean is the main hosting provider, some servers have ~40 CPUs
• 27:34 – They’re running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and the servers are managed by Ansible
• 32:33 – Using Authorize.Net to handle all payments and why they aren’t using Stripe
• 36:35 – The deploy process using Fabric from development to production
• 38:42 – Using feature flags with Django Waffle and deploying with a bit of down time
• 43:54 – Dealing with secrets by having an encrypted git repo
• 46:48 – Database backups happen through daily dumps and logging / monitoring
• 57:35 – Best tips? Start small, deploy early / often and automate as much as possible
• 1:01:08 – You can learn more about Dan on his site at https://velocitywebworks.com

Links

📄 References

• https://www.starlette.io/

⚙️ Tech Stack

• django →
• python →
• vue →
• ansible →
• authorize-net →
• digitalocean →
• gcp →
• lets-encrypt →
• nagios →
• nginx →
• postgres →
• redis →
• sentry →
• slack →
• supervisor →
• ubuntu →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework
• https://github.com/celery/celery
• https://github.com/jazzband/django-axes
• https://www.fabfile.org/
• https://github.com/unbit/uwsgi
• https://github.com/django-waffle/django-waffle

Support the Show

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