This blog will cover the concepts and overview of the solution and the technologies used for the implementation. The second blog will cover the configuration and deployment.
3-legged Table
I have come to the belief that for any service to compete it has to be supported by a three legged table where the legs are Robust, Fast and Accessible. Without any one of these the table is only valuable to produce heat in the fireplace.Robust
Web systems should not have “scheduled downtime”. I think that the convergence of two things have force us web developers to architect for 0 scheduled downtime. The first is to provide a 24/7 business platform for our users. The second is after launch the software is alive with continues updates until it gets turned off. Traditional business systems ran during business hours and then could be “maintained” from 5pm pacific time to 8am eastern time. There is a general move to a continuous updates of software where the more frequently the updates the more stable the system is and faster the technology can adjust to the business need (I am a fan).Fast
Usage can be directly correlated to the performance of a service. In a competitive market slow services will not be able to compete. Premature optimization has been the road to ruin of many a project but the ability to quickly optimize the service after launch will decide the success of the product.Accessible
The point of a service is for it to be access by users. One of the reasons I think that JSON became so popular is it simplicity. Again in competitive markets the barrier to entry approaches zero. This mean well document services that support 80% of the platforms (mobile, desktop ect) is a requirement to compete in the marketplace.Tools
Linux
This is a given for they types of service that I build. I could see a specific service that was for M$ that required using libraries that only work with Windows however I don’t image easy would be a part of that setup. Specifically I use Ubuntu however the configuration files / deploy script could very quickly be changed to use any Linux / BSD distribution.Fabric
Fabric is a Python tool for doing system administrative tasks. There are a lot of tools that do this most are pretty specific I find this tool provides the best balance between easy of use and flexibility. The problem I have with shell scripts is they tend to be great to start with but quickly find the limits when needing to do some string manipulation.Nginx
This is my web server of choice at the moment. I don’t think this matters so much but it provides very simple and quick configuration which is key the the easy part of setting up a cloud. Ultimately most web service is going to run proxied by something like this that will do all the gzip compressing and static file serving ect.MongoDB
Mongo is one of those new fangled database under the NoSQL (not only SQL). I think it provides the most general purpose and easiest to setup. The console is very easy to manage data. However for this exercise the critical part was the two line configuration change difference between master and slave. This made failover very simple. I think that redis would have also been as easy and the configuration probably as simple but I liked having some of mongo’s mixtures of traditional and modern features like having indexes and map/reduce support.
