This post was written by Tristan Fisher, Senior DevOps Engineer at SinglePlatform
SinglePlatform is an information management platform that syndicatesupdates to search engines and other content-aggregating sites. In big-Onotation, we seek to turn an O(n) process into an O(1) process for localand national businesses. In practical terms, our goal is to reduce theamount of effort needed to keep a business’s online presence current.
We’re chiefly a web development shop that’s driven by Python andJavaScript. Our customer-facing website is powered by Django (Python 2.x)with JavaScript (with Angular, jQuery libraries) handlinguser interactions. For our programmatic consumers, we have a collectionof APIs and services that are written in Python, Go, NodeJS, and PHP, butwe’re standardizing on using the Flask microframework for Python.Similarly, we think our future is in PostgreSQL, but various NoSQL andMySQL databases are currently working hard for us.
We run all of our servers in AWS, where we use Ansible and Python todrive our systems automation. To keep our operations toolkit small anduser-friendly, we’ve extended Ansible and make use of APIs that help usorchestrate server provisioning, alerting on metrics, and more.
I’m half of the Systems/DevOps team at SinglePlatform and story of thepast half-year has been “scalability and stability.” We’ve taken aninfrastructure that was built piecemeal over the course of years andre-deployed critical components of it in a programmatic fashion withminimal downtime. To make future improvements attainable, we’veimplemented software-defined networking in private networks on AWS,reduced our number of hard-to-maintain legacy parts, and have writtensystem tools that integrate into our existing toolkit. This is all to saythat we’ve increased the resiliency and performance of our systems stackwithout sacrificing code quality.
Meanwhile, on the customer-facing side of the business, we’ve beenworking on growing our business by adding features and extending our coreplatform to support new partnerships. We’ve made a version of our sitethat’s responsive to be more mobile-friendly, rewritten one of our coreAPIs from NodeJS to Python, and grown closer as a team as we add a myriadof fixes to our products through pull requests on GitHub. The biggestchallenge for us has been time poverty, but we’ve been focusing on ourcore competences and paying off our technical debt so we can be morecreative in the future.
Our near-term goals are auto-scaling infrastructures, programmaticcommunication of system statuses in terms appropriate for ournon-technical departments, further homogenization of our API stack, andadding talented men and women to our engineering team.
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