– A small team of developers actively work on the Exam Pro platform

– Motivation for using Ruby on Rails

– Would you use Rails again if you rewrote your app today?

– Monoliths are optimized for developer happiness not DevOps happiness

– Bypassing ActiveRecord to run raw SQL queries for database reads

– Using Rails Engines to break up the admin dashboard from the main app

– Trade offs for using 1 git repo vs multiple git repos

– Server side templates and a bit of JavaScript or an API back-end with lots of JS?

– Soon enough the front-end code will be completely separate and hosted on S3

– Pain points of using the asset pipeline and Rails specific build tools

– Action Cable is being used for something (but we don’t know what haha)

– Not using Sidekiq for background tasks, instead AWS SQS and the Ruby AWS SDK

– Docker is being used to run tests but not for dev and prod

– Cloud9 IDE is being used in development as an AWS based dev environment

– AWS Aurora is being used to manage a PostgreSQL database

– Your data is your most important asset, don’t leave it to chance

– A recap on what AWS SQS is and how it compares to Sidekiq, Resque or DelayedJob

– The main app responds back in 50-60 milliseconds without caching

– We never touch our servers, not even to SSH into them

– The Rails app is fronted by CloudFront and a load balancer, but not nginx

– SSL is terminated at the ELB level, not at each individual EC2 instance

– Comparing ELB to ALB and even NLB

– Strategies for migrating away from a monolithic application

– An S3 outage story that lead to using multi-region DNS fail over using Route 53

– What about error reporting, logging, monitoring and metrics?

– Sending transactional and campaign emails with SES and PinPoint

– Setting up 3rd party services with infrastructure as code tools is a huge win

– Sometimes there’s exceptions to the above, such as using Stripe to accept payments

– Configuration management on AWS with CloudFormation and Systems Manager

– They are using Amazon Linux 2 as their distro of choice

– Overall hosting costs less than $500 / month after all is said and done

– Zero down time deploys using blue / green deployments across 3 web servers

– Walking through a code deploy using various AWS resources and services

– Is is worth using managed services / mini-Heroku alternatives instead?

– Everyone Andrew knows who uses Heroku ends up leaving due to how pricey it is

– How do Rails database migrations get run?

– AWS really helps with database backups and disaster prevention / recovery

– Best tips and advice? Build a ton of apps and automate as much as possible

– You can find Andrew on Exam Pro,