Taleas Is a Cute, Quirky, Random and Slightly Weird Webcomic

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Seth Black
https://www.taleas.com/

In this episode of Running in Production, Seth Black goes over building a webcomic platform with Flask and Python. It runs on a multi-node Docker Swarm cluster on DigitalOcean and has been up and running since 2010. It gets up to 20,000+ visitors a day during traffic spikes.

Seth talks about the value of using nginx to cache Flask responses to keep the site from getting a hug of death from Reddit. He also talks about using nginx as a load balancer, running Docker Swarm, maintaining a web app that has been running for 10+ years, creating a flexible and robust deployment pipeline with GitHub Actions as a solo developer and a whole lot more.

Topics Include

  • 2:07 – Experiences with using Flask to build the site for the last 10+ years
  • 2:43 – Traffic ranges from 20,000+ visitors a day to hundreds per month
  • 4:54 – A simple 5 second cache can save your server from a huge traffic spike
  • 5:34 – Motivation for using Flask after having used many different frameworks / languages
  • 6:48 – It’s split into 2 services, one for the main app and one for analytics
  • 7:51 – The main app is about 1,000 lines of Python code with 15 database tables
  • 8:35 – Flask-Cache is used to cache the response of a few high traffic views
  • 8:55 – Each service has its own git repo that is independently deployed
  • 9:31 – Responses are sent out as server rendered templates using Jinja 2
  • 10:30 – A custom admin dashboard was built up over the years and it was worth it
  • 13:14 – Reducing page load speeds by lazy loading comic images as you scroll down
  • 14:29 – Websockets are being used in the admin to auto-save content in a real-time editor
  • 16:27 – MariaDB is being used as the main database and here’s why
  • 18:15 – Search isn’t implemented yet but it’s the number 1 user feature request
  • 19:25 – Having search allows you to get good insights on what folks are looking for
  • 20:07 – Full page caching is done with the free and open source version of nginx
  • 21:42 – gunicorn is being used for the Flask app server and it works fantastically
  • 21:57 – Everything is inside of Docker, running in a Swarm cluster
  • 22:47 – Docker Swarm was chosen over Kubernetes because Kubernetes was overkill
  • 25:08 – 2 web app servers that are load balanced, 2 DB servers, Redis and a load balancer
  • 25:34 – Celery isn’t being used but Redis is doing a few things
  • 26:27 – Why Seth moved from AWS to DigitalOcean over the years
  • 29:17 – The load balancer is on a 2 GB of memory / 50 GB SSD / 2 virtual CPUs server
  • 29:36 – The app servers have 4 GB of memory / 4 virtual CPUs and a bit more SSD disk space
  • 29:45 – The database server has 8 GB of memory / 4 virtual CPUs and a 128 GB SSD
  • 29:53 – Everything is running smoothly and purs like a kitten with various amounts of traffic
  • 30:18 – Seth uses the same database server for a few of his other sites
  • 31:15 – A combo of Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 are running with intent to upgrade
  • 32:04 – Seth’s upgrade process for when it comes time to upgrading Ubuntu to 20.04
  • 33:50 – DigitalOcean’s load balancer wasn’t around when all of this was set up
  • 35:06 – Everything was installed by hand on the servers but Seth likes Terraform and Puppet
  • 36:32 – You don’t always need to upgrade to the latest tool that came out today
  • 37:02 – Over time, the app was updated from Python 2.6 to 3.4+ which was painful
  • 37:58 – How do you stay motivated working on a project that’s been going for 10+ years?
  • 40:49 – Walking us through deploying code from development to production
  • 43:14 – GitHub Actions are used for CI / CD and it’s all automated with a single git push
  • 44:06 – Secrets are stored in DigitalOcean Spaces and then are built into images on demand
  • 46:17 – Error reporting and logging are handled through flat file logs that get backed up
  • 46:50 – Newsletters are sent through a semi-manual mail merge strategy with Google Sheets
  • 48:43 – An RSS feed is also available and Pinterest provides a decent amount of traffic
  • 49:45 – The database is backed up nightly and 30 days worth of backups are saved
  • 50:24 – All of the comic assets are backed up on DropBox and the code is on GitHub
  • 50:44 – If the servers were to get forcefully rebooted, some of them recover automatically
  • 51:36 – Various DigitalOcean alarms are set up to do email notifications if things go bad
  • 52:22 – Reddit is weird sometimes (the hug of death or down voted into oblivion)
  • 53:11 – Using DigitalOcean and his comic reader community for determining site healthiness
  • 54:55 – Best tips? Focus on doing something you’re passionate about, it really helps
  • 55:39 – Picking the right tool for the job is an art form and lean on trusted tools
  • 56:27 – One of Seth’s biggest mistakes was trying to build something fancy initially
  • 57:34 – Another thing was chasing / building weird things that his users didn’t ask for
  • 59:04 – Check out Seth’s webcomic - he’s also on GitHub and InstaGram
📄 References
⚙️ Tech Stack
🛠 Libraries Used

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.

  • Dive into Docker is a video course that takes you from not knowing what Docker is to being able to confidently use Docker and Docker Compose for your own apps. Long gone are the days of "but it works on my machine!". A bunch of follow along labs are included.
  • Build a SAAS App with Flask is a video course where we build a real world SAAS app that accepts payments, has a custom admin, includes high test coverage and goes over how to implement and apply 50+ common web app features. There's over 20+ hours of video.

Questions

  • Want to discuss this episode on Twitter? Tag @nickjanetakis or use #RunningInProduction

Mar 23, 2020

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