Politico Europe Is a Business to Business News and Data Service

Running in Production

In this episode of Running in Production, Karl Roos goes over building a B2B news and data platform with Rails, Node and Python. It’s hosted on AWS using Elastic Beanstalk and has been up and running since 2014.

Karl talks about writing a Rails API back-end, scraping 400+ sites, executing 500k+ daily jobs, using a bunch of AWS resources, what it’s like dealing with a ~500 GB MySQL database, the importance on taking action and more.

Topics Include

• 1:55 – What type of application we are talking about here?
• 4:41 – Switching from PHP to a combo of Rails and Node
• 8:02 – A few useful Ruby gems that were used to help build the app
• 9:41 – The Vue front-end is for a customer facing dashboard
• 14:48 – Where D3.js is being used to render charts and the data pipeline
• 17:43 – Scraping data from 400+ sites and dealing with edge cases
• 21:38 – The scraper runs on 10-16 EC2 instances through Elastic Beanstalk
• 26:04 – Each separate service lives in its own git repository and a bit of Serverless
• 31:06 – Sticking with the latest stable version of Rails and updating dependencies
• 33:10 – Sprinkles of Python to glue together a few AWS services and translating languages
• 36:11 – What it’s like using Elastic Beanstalk and executing 500k+ jobs a day
• 40:04 – Initial AWS credits helped sway the decision to try out AWS initially
• 43:47 – How CloudFormation and Terraform are being used
• 48:59 – All devs can push to production, code reviews, linting and the deploy process
• 54:21 – Dealing with database migrations and a ~400-500 GB data set
• 1:01:17 – Getting a local dump of the DB in development, seeding data and secrets
• 1:06:03 – Database backups are done with the built in RDS snapshots
• 1:10:19 – Best tips? Less thinking, more doing and learn from your experiments
• 1:11:35 – Karl is on GitHub and Twitter

Links

📄 References

• https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
• https://github.com/localstack/localstack

⚙️ Tech Stack

• rails →
• ruby →
• node →
• vue →
• python →
• algolia →
• aws →
• bugsnag →
• cloudformation →
• cloudfront →
• docker →
• elasticache →
• memcached →
• mysql →
• rds →
• redis →
• serverless →
• sns →
• sqs →
• terraform →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://graphql-ruby.org/
• https://www.apollographql.com/
• https://bulma.io/
• https://d3js.org/
• https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio
• https://www.serverless.com/
• https://codeclimate.com/
• https://github.com/typicode/husky

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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