SongRender Lets You Create Audio Visualizer Videos from Audio Clips

May 17, 2021

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In this episode of Running in Production, Jake Lazaroff talks about building a video rendering service with Express and Node. It runs on a few DigitalOcean servers and has been up and running in production since February 2019.

Jake goes over rendering ~30k+ videos over 2+ years, executing background tasks, sharing lots of code between the back-end and front-end, using both Stripe and PayPal, not using an ORM with PostgreSQL, setting up Blue / Green deploys with Terraform, Packer and nginx, plus tons more.

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4:07 – Shipping an MVP in a bit under 6 months working on it nights and weekends
6:54 – About 125 videos are rendered per day (~30k since the 2+ years it’s been up)
9:09 – Motivation for using Express and Node and a few libs he’s using server side
12:02 – The app is mostly monolithic and Bull handles processing background tasks
13:10 – A background task spawns DigitalOcean servers for video rendering
16:14 – Both the Node back-end and JS front-end are in the same repo and share code
17:49 – The shared code lets you get real-time video previews straight in the browser
20:06 – Create React App was used as a base to build the front-end
22:16 – Hugo powers the marketing site and is hosted on Netlify
24:00 – There’s no custom theme, it’s all hand crafted CSS using SASS
25:30 – Both Stripe and PayPal are used to handle 1 time and subscription payments
31:03 – The admin back-end is a bunch of API endpoints protected by an admin user flag
32:33 – PostgreSQL is the primary database and no ORM is being used
34:56 – TypeScript is used through out the code base / nginx + Cloudflare is being used
36:31 – Docker isn’t being used in development / Postmark is used for sending emails out
38:43 – Blue / Green deploys with Terraform, Packer and nginx on DigitalOcean
41:56 – Ubuntu LTS is running on all of the servers
42:41 – 1 CPU / 1 GB for the API server & load balancer, 1 CPU / 3 GB for the renderers
43:04 – Paid videos get a CPU optimized render server with 4 CPUs / 8 GB of memory
44:41 – Videos use up a lot of storage and they’re stored on DigitalOcean Spaces
47:35 – Ansible was used in the past but now everything is baked into the Packer image
48:53 – The deploy process from development to production
54:31 – Database migrations are run out of band with a tool called Dbmate
55:28 – Backups are handled with DigitalOcean’s automated backups
58:16 – Alarms, alerts, monitoring and error reporting
1:01:57 – The paid plan has unlimited video uploads and overall hosting is ~$125 / month
1:07:05 – Best tips? You can’t go too wrong with choosing boring technology
1:09:27 – Check out SongRender (IG / Twitter), Jake has a personal blog and is on Twitter too

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SongRender Lets You Create Audio Visualizer Videos from Audio Clips

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