In this episode of Running in Production, Tigran Nazaryan covers building a WordPress hosting platform with Laravel, Python and Node. It’s hosted on GCP for their clients’ sites and OVH for their core services. It’s been up and running as a hosting platform since late 2020.

Tigran talks about working with a team of 34 engineers, using both MongoDB and MySQL, creating a bunch of services with a very well thought out architecture while keeping it simple enough for it to all run on a developer’s laptop. He covered a lot of ground.

Topics Include

• 1:49 – Thousands of customers have their site hosted there
• 3:00 – A break down of their stack (there’s a lot going on)
• 4:38 – Motivation for choosing a mixture of programming languages and frameworks
• 7:10 – All of the services are independent and live in their own git repo
• 9:23 – The image optimizer service is written with Laravel
• 12:34 – MongoDB is quite heavily used by a number of services
• 15:40 – How to optimize CSS and JS bundles with many WordPress plugins
• 21:13 – The hosting service is written in Python with MySQL for a DB (hosted on GCP)
• 23:52 – It’s mostly Linux containers being used but Docker is used in some spots
• 25:11 – End customers don’t need to worry about things like nginx and SSL certs
• 30:30 – Other tech components that’s in their stack
• 32:00 – Payments are handled monthly or annually with Stripe and PayPal
• 33:12 – Client sites are hosted on Google Cloud and their services are on OVH
• 37:33 – Some of the servers are pretty beefy with 32GB of memory and 8+ CPU cores
• 39:56 – Developers can run everything on their own laptops
• 44:27 – The developers who build a service are responsible for deploying it
• 45:26 – The process to set up a server is documented and automated when possible
• 48:46 – Customers can access their hosted sites very quickly after signing up
• 51:13 – The deployment process from development to production
• 56:55 – Databases are backed up and core services are load balanced
• 59:04 – Keeping track of errors, monitoring and alerting
• 1:03:45 – Cloudflare is sitting in front of the core services
• 1:06:42 – Best tips? Really focus on getting a good architecture designed early on
• 1:10:36 – Check out https://10web.io/, Tigran’s LinkedIn and their Engineer blog

Links

• https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

• laravel →
• php →
• python →
• node →
• angularjs →
• cloudflare →
• docker →
• gcp →
• lets-encrypt →
• mongodb →
• mysql →
• nginx →
• ovh →
• paypal →
• redis →
• sentry →
• slack →
• stripe →
• ubuntu →

• https://github.com/PyCQA/flake8
• https://github.com/psf/black
• https://github.com/PyCQA/bandit

Support the Show

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