Building an Internal App to Track 1,200+ VMs and Servers at REI

Running in Production

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3+ y ago 55:47

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In this episode of Running in Production, Sean Callaway talks about building an app to help manage REI’s server infrastructure. It was built with Django and it’s mostly hosted on premises in their own data center.

Sean covers keeping the app mostly server rendered and goes into detail about using Ansible, Kubernetes and Rancher to help manage things.

Topics Include

4:16 – Motivation for using Django and Python
6:27 – The Django admin is not being used
8:20 – Using Ansible to automate spinning up VMware based VMs
10:17 – It’s a monolithic application and it does use Django apps
12:14 – A high level overview of what the app does to help visualize it
15:14 – It’s using Django templates and they tuned a few database queries
18:19 – PostgreSQL is used for some data and maybe Celery will be used soon
21:07 – nginx is serving static files and Kubernetes’ ingress controller handles SSL certs
23:43 – Docker Compose is being used in dev and what Kubernetes has been like so far
28:42 – Pretty much all of their servers are hosted on premises
31:17 – Using Grafana, Splunk and Prometheus for logging and monitoring
34:26 – For the Linux servers, they’re running CentOS with Rancher
38:50 – The entire flow for pushing code from development to production
45:37 – Database backups and planning for disasters
51:50 – Best tips? Containerize your app quickly
55:05 – You can find Sean on GitHub, Twitter and he has a blog at https://callaway.dev

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