forked from cadey/xesite
125 lines
5.2 KiB
Markdown
125 lines
5.2 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
title: CinemaQuestria Orchestration
|
|
date: 2015-03-13
|
|
tags:
|
|
- cinemaquestria
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
CinemaQuestria Orchestration
|
|
============================
|
|
|
|
### Or: Continuous Defenstration in a Container-based Ecosystem
|
|
|
|
I've been a core member of the staff for [CinemaQuestria](http://cinemaquestria.com)
|
|
for many months. In that time we have gone from shared hosting (updated by hand
|
|
with FTP) to a git-based deployment system that has won over the other
|
|
staffers.
|
|
|
|
In this blogpost I'm going to take a look at what it was, what it is, and what
|
|
it will be as well as some challenges that have been faced or will be faced as
|
|
things advance into the future.
|
|
|
|
The Past
|
|
--------
|
|
|
|
The site for CinemaQuestria is mostly static HTML. This was chosen mainly
|
|
because it made the most sense for the previous shared hosting environment as
|
|
it was the least surprising to set up and test.
|
|
|
|
The live site content is about 50 MB of data including PDF transcripts of
|
|
previous podcast episodes and for a long time was a Good Enough solution that
|
|
we saw no need to replace it.
|
|
|
|
However, being on shared hosting it meant that there was only one set of
|
|
authentication credentials and they had to be shared amongst ourselves. This
|
|
made sense as we were small but as we started to grow it didn't make much
|
|
sense. Combined with the fact that the copy of the site on the live server *was
|
|
pretty much the only copy of the site* we also lost disaster recovery points.
|
|
|
|
Needless to say, I started researching into better solutions for this.
|
|
|
|
The first solution I took a look at was AWS S3. It would let us host the CQ
|
|
site for about 0 dollars per month. On paper this looked amazing, until we
|
|
tried it and everyone was getting huge permissions issues. The only way to have
|
|
fixed this would have been to have everyone use the same username/password or
|
|
to have only one person do the deploys. In terms of reducing the [Bus
|
|
factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor) of the site's staff, this was
|
|
also unacceptable.
|
|
|
|
I had done a lot of work with [Dokku-alt](https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-alt)
|
|
for hosting my personal things (this site is one of many hosted on this
|
|
server), so I decided to give it a try with us.
|
|
|
|
The Present
|
|
-----------
|
|
|
|
Presently the CQ website is hosted on a Dokku-alt server inside a container.
|
|
For a while while I was working on getting the warts out only I had access to
|
|
deploy code to the server, but quickly on I set up a private repo on my git
|
|
server for us to be able to track changes.
|
|
|
|
Once the other staffers realized the enormous amount of flexibility being on
|
|
git gave us they loved it. From the comments I received the things they liked
|
|
the most were:
|
|
|
|
- Accountability for who made what change
|
|
- The ability to rollback changes if need be
|
|
- Everyone being able to have an entire copy of the site and its history
|
|
|
|
After the warts were worked out I gave the relevant people access to the dokku
|
|
server in the right way and the productivity has skyrocketed. Not only have
|
|
people loved how simple it is to push out new changes but they love how
|
|
consistent it is and the brutal simplicity of it.
|
|
|
|
Mind you these are not all super-technically gifted people, but the command
|
|
line git client was good enough that not only were they able to commit and make
|
|
changes to the site, but they also took initiative and *corrected things they
|
|
messed up* and made sure things were consistent and correct.
|
|
|
|
When I saw those commits in the news feed, I almost started crying tears of
|
|
happy.
|
|
|
|
Nowadays our site is hosted inside a simple [nginx
|
|
container](https://registry.hub.docker.com/_/nginx/). In fact, I'll even paste
|
|
the entire Dockerfile for the site below:
|
|
|
|
```Dockerfile
|
|
FROM nginx
|
|
|
|
COPY . /usr/share/nginx/html
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
That's it. When someone pushes a new change to the server it figures out
|
|
everything from just those two lines of code.
|
|
|
|
Of course, this isn't to say this system is completely free of warts. I'd love
|
|
to someday be able to notify the backrooms on skype every time a push to the
|
|
live server is made, but that might be for another day.
|
|
|
|
The Future
|
|
----------
|
|
|
|
In terms of future expansion I am split mentally. On one hand the existing
|
|
static HTML is *hysterically fast* and efficient on the server, meaning that
|
|
anything such as a Go binary, Lua/Lapis environment or other web application
|
|
framework would have a very tough reputation to beat.
|
|
|
|
I have looked into using Lapis for [this beta test site](http://cqsite-beta.apps.xeserv.us/),
|
|
but the fact that HTML is so dead easy to modify made that idea lose out.
|
|
|
|
Maybe this is in the realm of something like [jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com/),
|
|
[Hugo](http://gohugo.io/) or [sw](https://github.com/jroimartin/sw) to take
|
|
care of. I'd need to do more research into this when I have the time.
|
|
|
|
If you look at the website code currently a lot of it is heavily duplicated
|
|
code because the shared hosting version used to use Apache server-side
|
|
includes. I think a good place to apply these would be in the build in the
|
|
future. Maybe with a nice husking operation on build.
|
|
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
Anyways, I hope this was interesting and a look into a side of CinemaQuestria
|
|
that most of you haven't seen before. The Season 5 premiere is coming up soon
|
|
and this poor server is going to get hammered like nothing else, so that will
|
|
be a nice functional test of Dokku-alt in a production setting.
|