Games Directory Lets You Sync Your Games and Achievements in 1 Place
Running in Production
English - August 30, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 61.3 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
Vlad Radulescu goes over creating a game directory site with Ruby on Rails. It's hosted on AWS and has up and running since 2014.
In this episode of Running in Production, Vlad Radulescu goes over creating a
game directory site with Ruby on Rails. It’s hosted on AWS and has been up
and running since 2014.
Vlad talks about having thousands of active users, interfacing with a few game
platform APIs, running millions of Sidekiq jobs, storing 10+ billion database
records, keeping things as a monolithic app, deploying the web app to 1 server
and lots more.
Topics Include
6:30 – Motivation for switching from PHP to Ruby on Rails
7:07 – Figuring out which gaming API to implement first and how their APIs are
10:27 – Reverse engineering undocumented API calls from the Windows Steam client
12:18 – Using a separate database for each gaming platform provider
15:05 – A few useful features of Rails that’s being used and Stimulus Reflex
20:19 – Switching from Webpacker to using Vite
23:14 – Using Slim instead of ERB and a few other gems being used
25:29 – It’s a single monolithic Rails app that’s using namespaces
28:36 – A lot of the time spent developing this app is working with the game APIs
31:00 – Using Sidekiq, a billion (!) gamer activities stored and millions of Sidekiq jobs
34:18 – It’s hosted on a single AWS T2.large instance (4 vCPUs / 16 GB memory)
36:13 – The database is on an R6g.large with 10+ billion records
39:14 – Ansible was used to set up the EC2 instance and it’s running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
41:13 – A couple of AWS resources being used
43:01 – The process to ship a feature from development to production
44:16 – Switching to using TailwindCSS in a nicely controlled way
47:57 – At the moment the site is free with no desire to make it pay to win
49:55 – Hosting is $1,500 pounds a month and it’s been running for free for 7+ years
51:43 – There’s 7 terabytes of S3 storage and daily database backups
55:59 – 50ish mini servers spread across Heroku’s free tier to bypass API rate limits
59:45 – Being dialed into the ops side of things but there’s room for improvement
1:00:54 – Keeping up with a full date job and a long running passion project
1:02:25 – Best tips? Don’t forget to plan things out
1:05:56 – You can find Vlad on Twitter and Games Directory will be open source soon
Links
📄 References
https://www.giantbomb.com/api/
https://www.telerik.com/fiddler
https://games.directory/u/pacmakaveli (Vlad’s profile)
⚙️ Tech Stack
rails →
ruby →
ansible →
aws →
better-uptime →
elasticache →
elasticsearch →
github-actions →
lets-encrypt →
memcached →
mysql →
nginx →
rds →
redis →
s3 →
sentry →
tailwindcss →
turbolinks →
ubuntu →
🛠 Libraries Used
https://github.com/stimulusreflex/stimulus_reflex
https://vitejs.dev/
https://github.com/puma/puma
https://github.com/slim-template/slim-rails
https://github.com/github/view_component
https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
Support the Show
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