Paparazzi Accessories Is an E-commerce Store That Sells Jewelry

Copied URL with current time.
0:00 / 0:00

In this episode of Running in Production, Dan Purcell goes over building an e-commerce store with Django that processes up to 3,000 orders per second. It’s running on 12+ web servers on DigitalOcean and the site has been up and running since 2014.

Dan covers building an API backed app with Vue on the front-end, handling thousands of concurrent websocket connections, using Authorize.Net for payments and deploying to a bunch of web servers that are managed by Ansible with Fabric.

Topics Include

  • 3:49 – Motivation for using Django and Python
  • 8:13 – It’s a monolithic app with about a dozen Django apps using Vue on the front-end
  • 11:42 – Challenges of dealing with thousands of concurrent sales
  • 17:01 – Using Celery, Redis and 4 beefy PostgreSQL servers that are replicated
  • 19:50 – Managing suspicious login attempts and using Slack for important notifications
  • 22:02 – Running 3 nginx servers and using Sentry for exception tracking
  • 24:02 – DigitalOcean is the main hosting provider, some servers have ~40 CPUs
  • 27:34 – They’re running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and the servers are managed by Ansible
  • 32:33 – Using Authorize.Net to handle all payments and why they aren’t using Stripe
  • 36:35 – The deploy process using Fabric from development to production
  • 38:42 – Using feature flags with Django Waffle and deploying with a bit of down time
  • 43:54 – Dealing with secrets by having an encrypted git repo
  • 46:48 – Database backups happen through daily dumps and logging / monitoring
  • 57:35 – Best tips? Start small, deploy early / often and automate as much as possible
  • 1:01:08 – You can learn more about Dan on his site at https://velocitywebworks.com
📄 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

Oct 26, 2020

✏️ Edit on GitHub