Brightpath Is a Formative School Assessment Tool

Running in Production

In this episode of Running in Production, Kye Russell goes over running a formative school assessment tool for 800+ schools in Australia. It’s built with Django and it’s been running in production since 2017 on AWS.

Kye is the solo developer on the project. It’s a monolith split across 10+ Django apps. They’ve gone all-in with a bunch of AWS services and Kye sticks to a number of best practices such as having tests, linting and using services to help keep things running smoothly.

Topics Include

• 7:04 – Motivation to rewrite the app in Django and Python
• 9:24 – The Django admin and having a monolith split into 10-15 Django apps
• 14:59 – About 50k lines of Python code, 10k of Django templates and 10k of JS
• 20:38 – Interesting Python / Django libraries used in the project
• 28:35 – Postgres as a main SQL DB and Redis for caching + SQS & Celery for bg jobs
• 32:24 – Docker is being used in development, nginx + uwsgi is being used too
• 35:24 – Going all-in with AWS for hosting and ISO 27001 compliance
• 45:35 – Dealing with a massive amount of user uploads, virus scanning, etc.
• 48:58 – Linting the code base with Black
• 50:28 – Deploying code with Fabric, the Python AWS SDK and baking AMIs
• 55:36 – Database backups, S3 is super reliable and CloudWatch alarms
• 59:40 – Using Sentry for error reporting and APM solutions
• 1:03:06 – Best tips? Use boring technology whenever you possibly can
• 1:05:15 – Kye has a site with 1 blog post and he’s also on Twitter

Links

📄 References

• https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/iso-27001-faqs/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_performance_management

⚙️ Tech Stack

• django →
• python →
• aws →
• backbone →
• cloudformation →
• cloudfront →
• cloudwatch →
• docker →
• nginx →
• postgres →
• rds →
• redis →
• route53 →
• s3 →
• sentry →
• ses →
• sns →
• sqs →
• ubuntu →
• webpack →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas
• https://github.com/numpy/numpy
• https://github.com/BetterWorks/django-impersonate
• https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework
• https://bridgekeeper.leigh.party/
• https://github.com/celery/celery
• https://github.com/unbit/uwsgi
• https://github.com/psf/black/
• https://www.fabfile.org/

Support the Show

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