Hear about how folks are running their web apps in production. We'll cover tech choices, why they chose them, lessons learned and more.
TextDB Is a Simple Way to Share Small Amounts of Data
In this episode of Running in Production, Ian Davidson goes over building a data sharing service using Phoenix and Elixir. It’s using Live View too. At its peak the site received a spike of 10k+ requests in a day and it’s hosted on a $20 / month DigitalOcean server.
Ian talks about quickly building the app, reacting quickly to add user requested features, using DigitalOcean for the first time, some pitfalls of using Live View / websockets when it comes to configuring nginx and more.
Topics Include
- 1:35 – Motivation for using Phoenix, Elixir and Live View
- 4:14 – How the site works, it saves data to a combination of PostgreSQL and the file system
- 5:48 – The experience of developing the app with Phoenix Live View
- 8:42 – Adding features quickly based on user feedback
- 11:13 – It’s an open source monolithic code base sitting in 1 git repo on GitHub
- 14:43 – nginx is sitting in front of the cowboy server and terminals SSL
- 16:57 – It’s hosted on DigitalOcean for $20 / month (2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM)
- 18:56 – The OS is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and DigitalOcean’s automated backups are on
- 20:17 – The server was set up and configured manually without using Elixir releases too
- 22:36 – The deployment process from development to production
- 26:41 – The BEAM takes about 5 seconds to restart which is a bit of down time
- 28:50 – DigitalOcean’s Cloud Firewall is being used along with their monitoring tools
- 32:00 – nginx is taking care of basic rate limiting by IP address
- 34:20 – Best tips? Phoenix is a great choice for side projects but beware of websockets
- 36:11 – Not having end to end tests before launching was kind of a mistake
- 37:34 – Check out the site at https://textdb.dev/
Links
📄 References- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23948234
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvmYaFkNJI (Real-time Twitter clone Live View demo)
- https://applitools.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/pasted-image-0.png
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_(Erlang_virtual_machine)
- https://github.com/artilleryio/artillery
- phoenix →
- elixir →
- digitalocean →
- dnsimple →
- lets-encrypt →
- nginx →
- open-source →
- postgres →
- ubuntu →
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.
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