Load Balance, Secure and Observe Your Web Applications with Nova ADC

Dec 19, 2019

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

In this episode of Running in Production, Dave Blakey goes over how their load balancing service (Nova) handles 33,000+ events per second across a 100+ server Kubernetes cluster that runs on both AWS and DigitalOcean. There’s a sprinkle of Serverless thrown in too.

If you ever wondered how a large scale app is developed and deployed, you’re in for a treat. Some of Nova’s clients spend $5,000,000+ a month on hosting fees. We covered everything from development best practices, how to create a scalable application architecture and how they replicate their environment across multiple cloud providers and regions.

P.S., Nova is also really useful for small sites too and they have a free tier with no strings attached, so you may want to give it a try. After this episode the first thing I thought was “wtf, why am I not using this?”. I’m going to start playing with it over the holidays for my own sites.

Topics Include

1:31 – 2 teams composed of 9 developers work on the back-end and front-end
1:59 – Motivation for choosing Golang for the back-end came down to scaling requirements
2:57 – Tens of thousands of clients are connected to 1 point of control (the Golang server)
3:24 – Balancing operational scale with developer programming speed
3:43 – Their dev team has lots of programming experience and decided Golang was solid
4:28 – The client / server architecture of how their load balancer is installed
5:38 – The “cloud” component which is the managed web UI to configure your load balancer
5:54 – The web UI is written in PHP using Laravel
6:39 – It wasn’t really a matter of using Laravel, it was “should we even use a framework?”
7:16 – Motivation for picking Laravel for the web interface
8:08 – Picking a web framework where hiring isn’t a problem and the documentation is great
8:47 – The Laravel app isn’t a monolithic app, many things run on Kubernetes and Serverless
9:38 – As an end user, if you click a button on the site it ultimately leads to a job running
9:57 – Docker and Vagrant are heavily being used in development
10:43 – This isn’t a typical web app, there’s lots of moving parts to deal with in development
11:34 – Vagrant makes it really easy to network together your VMs to other systems
12:08 – The value in spending the time in your dev tooling to spin new devs up quickly
12:46 – InfluxDB is being used as a time series database and what problems it solves
13:45 – After only 4 months of being around, we’re writing 33,000+ metrics per second
14:37 – Nova operates at massive scale but if you’re not, maybe stick with a SQL database
15:19 – Their load balancer is the single source that your clients (web visitors) connect to
15:50 – Even if Nova happens to have growing pains, it won’t affect your site’s up-time at all
17:18 – What makes Nova different than a load balancer on AWS, GCP or anywhere else?
17:42 – It’s an ADC with availability, security, caching and observability
18:37 – Nova is more than load balancing and there’s also multi-cloud hosting to think about
19:14 – For example, Nova is currently hosted on both AWS and DigitalOcean
19:30 – It’s difficult to rely on cloud specific services (ELB, ALB, Firewalls, etc.)
20:14 – Nova is replicated between AWS and DigitalOcean for redundancy
20:57 – (40) $20 / month servers on DigitalOcean running in Kubernetes
21:42 – And another (100) servers for their testing environment to perform load tests
21:55 – About (20) servers are running on AWS
22:01 – For the Nova load balancers, they are running on $5 / month DigitalOcean droplets
22:21 – Everything is running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, except for a few servers running 19.x
22:49 – On AWS, those 20 servers range from $40-60 / month
23:07 – 2-4 CPU cores is the sweet spot for their work load, more cores doesn’t help much
23:55 – They run their own load balancer to manage their own infrastructure
24:29 – Most of their servers are a piece of a Kubernetes cluster
24:49 – The rest of the servers are template driven but we’re not using Ansible, etc.
25:42 – Those development changes were great because it makes things easier to scale
26:11 – Kubernetes is nice but it took a lot of changes in development to make it work
26:23 – There is no magic Kubernetes button to scale, it takes a lot of preparation
27:35 – Nova supports many different deployment environments, not just Kubernetes
28:11 – For example, you can load balance (2) DigitalOcean droplets, here’s how it works
30:01 – Doing things like rolling restarts is all handled by Nova
31:05 – Using Kubernetes is hard, especially for larger organizations
31:30 – What would the deploy process look like for an end user load balancing 2 servers?
33:35 – Performing an automated rolling restart with Kubernetes
34:16 – The dangers of a fully automated rolling restart without extra “smarts”
34:44 – Nova’s deploy process for their own infrastructure (Golang server and client)
36:21 – Their CI / CD environment runs on CircleCI but the deploy script is custom
36:57 – Secrets are managed mostly with environment variables
38:16 – Being cloud neutral is a trend right now (AKA, not being locked into a vendor)
38:41 – Moving the data, replication and keeping things in sync are the hardest parts
38:54 – End to end, a new web UI deploy for Nova could be done in under 10 seconds
40:20 – What about deploying the client / server component? It’s quite a bit different
40:57 – Shell scripts can go a long ways, especially for gluing together deployment code
41:44 – A lot of monitoring and reporting is kept in-house for performance reasons
42:12 – For error reporting on the web UI with Laravel, it goes to Sentry
42:16 – Then it’s all integrated with an agent-less DataDog and Slack notifications
43:17 – It’s nice using 3rd party tools that integrate easily like Laravel and Sentry
43:36 – Not using DigitalOcean’s alerting mainly due to working with a cluster of servers
44:30 – Being able to switch cloud hosting providers without a huge fuss
44:37 – One of Nova’s clients spend 5 million US dollars a month on cloud hosting fees
45:00 – Another client has 500+ load balances deployed across 5,000+ servers
45:30 – Spending that kind of money on hosting fees is a whole different level
45:59 – Nowadays a small team can be responsible for a huge amount of infrastructure
46:51 – WhatsApp and Instagram are great examples of a few devs with lots of end users
47:12 – We live in an interesting time where 1 developer can do so much
47:27 – Nova’s test environment has 1 million connected clients
48:00 – Their databases are run across multiple data centers and are auto-backed up
49:19 – Their business is redundancy and up-time, so good disaster plans are necessary
49:36 – Working with high traffic clients helped define best practices
50:31 – Nova is great for small sites too and you get 5 nodes for free (no strings attached)
52:01 – It’s not a pay to win system, the free tier has everything you would need at that scale
52:55 – Stripe is being used to process payments and it uses the new Payments Intents API
53:28 – Nova bills you per hour instead of per month and Stripe makes this really easy
55:46 – SendGrid is being used to send transactional emails to end users
56:12 – They send less than a 1,000 emails out a day (mostly for notifications and alerts)
56:41 – Their load balancer deals with handling SSL certificates using Let’s Encrypt
56:59 – End users of the service don’t need to worry about issuing their own SSL certs
57:34 – Push button, receive bacon
57:51 – If you’re in the public cloud you can also get encryption end to end
58:43 – Dealing with SSL at the load balancer level can save a lot of headaches
58:54 – It comes back to setting up your app using best practices in order to scale
59:35 – Best tips? Create a code contract to help keep your code sane for years to come
1:00:56 – It’s sort of like Heroku’s 12 factor guidelines but not really
1:01:06 – It’s more like 8 things to do to avoid an angry meme in your pull request
1:01:36 – It’s 8 core concepts (but it doesn’t need to be 8) to define your system’s purpose
1:02:49 – One mistake that was corrected was under estimating time series databases
1:03:52 – snapt is their parent company, Nova is the load balancer service that we talked about today, and you can also find them @SnaptADC on Twitter

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.

Dive into Docker is a video course that takes you from not knowing what Docker is to being able to confidently use Docker and Docker Compose for your own apps. Long gone are the days of "but it works on my machine!". A bunch of follow along labs are included.

Build a SAAS App with Flask is a video course where we build a real world SAAS app that accepts payments, has a custom admin, includes high test coverage and goes over how to implement and apply 50+ common web app features. There's over 20+ hours of video.

Load Balance, Secure and Observe Your Web Applications with Nova ADC

Topics Include

Links

📄 References

⚙️ Tech Stack

Support the Show