A Weather Analysis Service for Regular People and Meteorologists

Mar 2, 2020

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In this episode of Running in Production, Nick Gregory walks us through what it’s like building Vortex Weather which uses Flask and Python to help understand the weather. It’s hosted on bare metal servers running in a colo on top of a self managed Kubernetes cluster.

Nick goes into detail on having to manage 750+ GB of data that needs to be recycled every 2 days and having his own servers with a combined, 24 physical CPU cores, 128+ GB of RAM and 10+ TB of disk space. The app is open source and it’s his side project, so he also talked about tips on how to manage his time and enforce self imposed deadlines.

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1:59 – Weather data can come from a number of different sources
3:01 – 750+ GB of data is cycled every 2 days and it needs to be queryable in ~200ms
3:57 – This is Nick’s side project and he’s the sole developer which has its challenges
5:13 – The app is open source on GitHub
5:26 – Motivation for using Python and Flask
6:53 – Picking gunicorn over uwsgi, mainly for ease of deployment
9:32 – The web front-end is a monolith but the data processing happens in a different service
10:55 – Looking at Go for more performance on the math heavy calculations
12:15 – Ingesting data is done through Kubernetes cron jobs and it’s backed by PostgreSQL
15:00 – PostgreSQL is really amazing and works great as a queue back-end
16:34 – PostgreSQL was originally used for the 750 GB of data but then it was moved to S3
18:41 – The files on S3 are 10+ GB in size (each)
19:36 – The files are a huge series of floats in a binary format
21:02 – PostgreSQL ends up storing a little bit of meta-data that’s used to get data from S3
21:19 – It was all moved out of PostgreSQL because…
24:03 – Before the S3 change there were over 2.5 billion rows being saved to PostgreSQL
25:10 – Seriously, PostgreSQL is really good
25:49 – Visualizing weather in a radar view requires a massive amount of computing power
28:23 – Predicting the weather in the short term future based on clouds and wind
30:54 – Docker is being used in development and it’s making things a lot easier
32:01 – Ubuntu is being used as a base OS for the Docker images
33:28 – Traefik sits in front of gunicorn to do TLS termination and act as a reverse proxy
35:10 – Traefik is rock solid but it’s not a complete drop in replacement for nginx
38:27 – (2) servers are sitting in a colo for now, mainly for cost and performance wins
40:13 – The TL;DR on what a colo (colocation) is and what it’s like owning your own hardware
41:27 – Server 1 has 8 CPU cores, 96 GB of RAM, 6 TB of HDD space in RAID-5 and a 2 TB SSD
42:10 – Server 2 is a Threadripper with 16 CPU cores, 64 GB of RAM and (2) 2 TB NVME SSDs
42:53 – How much storage could you fit? 10+ SSDs plus the PCI slots on the motherboard
43:47 – Getting similar capacity and performance with AWS would be a lot more money
44:49 – Nick runs a Debian based distro called Proxmox
45:55 – A good GUI is one of the selling points for Proxmox, even though it’s on a server
46:41 – Kubernetes is self managed but it was configured with Rancher’s RKE
48:49 – Prior to finding RKE, he almost went with Swarm due to Kubernetes’ complexity
49:54 – Currently there’s no error reporting set up, but Sentry.io is on the horizon
51:24 – Deploying code from development to production
51:34 – The weather app is on the Docker Hub at kallsyms/wx_explore
53:22 – CI isn’t being used now but a self hosted Gitlab instance might happen in the future
54:09 – As long as the kubeconfig stays out of CI, then it’s all good
55:43 – How are database migrations dealt with? By avoiding them since they’re not needed
58:56 – What about backing up the database? It’s also not needed since it’s all recreatable
59:57 – The weather tool is made for both regular people and meteorologists
1:03:34 – StatusCake’s free tier is being used to do uptime monitoring
1:05:55 – Best tips? Learning to self manage your time and break down problems
1:07:01 – Learning best practices and tips on how to optimize Docker performance
1:08:05 – Keeping yourself accountable for hitting self imposed deadlines
1:11-20 – You can find Nick on Twitter @kallsyms and on GitHub too

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A Weather Analysis Service for Regular People and Meteorologists

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