Couchmate Is a Social Chat Platform for Viewers of Live TV
Running in Production
English - July 19, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 106 MB - ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsTechnology News Tech News deployment elixir flask hosting node rubyonrails phoenix production python techstacks Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Matt Oliver goes over building a chat platform with Akka, Scala and React Native. It's hosted on DigitalOcean with Kubernetes.
In this episode of Running in Production, Matt Oliver goes over building
a chat platform with Akka, Scala and React Native. It’s hosted on DigitalOcean
with Kubernetes and has been running in production since 2013.
Matt talks about rewriting his app a few times, handling tens of thousands of
nightly TV shows, going all-in with Kubernetes, using Terraform, understanding
it’ll take a while to learn things along the way and more.
Topics Include
4:55 – Going from PHP to Scala to Node and back to Scala for the back-end
15:09 – Tens of thousands of channels are created every night
16:39 – What exactly is Akka and the actor model
19:55 – Websockets are being used quite heavily
23:04 – A few Scala libraries that were useful for building this platform
27:31 – There’s a mobile front-end using React Native for Android and iOS
31:30 – Storing and caching TV listings with Gracenote
34:53 – Roughly ~25k lines of Scala and ~11k on the front-end in 2 repos
39:41 – Motivation for using React Native instead of using native languages
45:55 – How to deal with large show TVs with a massive audience
50:28 – The app is basically 3 screens
54:34 – Handling user uploaded gifs and link submissions
1:00:09 – What it was like building out the React Native front-end
1:05:54 – Reasons for picking DigitalOcean and using Kubernetes
1:14:44 – Most of the infrastructure is managed by Terraform
1:16:57 – What it was like to go from not using Kubernetes to going all-in with it
1:24:21 – (3) 2 GB of memory / 2 CPU core servers are running the cluster
1:26:12 – What it’s like developing a new feature and deploying it to production
1:34:28 – The database is backed up on a schedule and before schema changes
1:39:21 – Prometheus, Grafana, Kamon and Sentry are used for metrics and monitoring
1:43:41 – Pingdom is used for an external site monitor
1:44:31 – It took about a month to get confident in using Kubernetes
1:49:29 – Best tips? It’s going to take a while, hang in there
1:53:06 – Writing comments for your future self while learning
1:54:34 – Matt is on Twitter and most socials as @halfmatthalfcat and @couchmatehq
Links
📄 References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_program_guide
https://www.gracenote.com/on-entertainment-tv-listings/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query
https://tenor.com/
⚙️ Tech Stack
akka →
scala →
react-native →
cloudflare →
digitalocean →
github-actions →
grafana →
kamon →
kubernetes →
lets-encrypt →
mailgun →
pingdom →
postgres →
prometheus →
redis →
sentry →
slack →
terraform →
vercel →
🛠 Libraries Used
https://github.com/redis/jedis
https://github.com/lloydmeta/enumeratum
https://scala-slick.org/
https://material-ui.com/
https://github.com/reduxjs/redux
https://helm.sh/
https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns
https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane
Support the Show
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you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my
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