– What type of content does Alchemist Camp have?

– The whole platform was developed by Mark

– Motivation for using Elixir and Phoenix

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

– Finding a balance between productivity and ease of maintenance

– Alchemist Camp is a monolithic application but uses it Phoenix contexts

– The app has roughly 10,000+ lines of Elixir code across 240+ Elixir modules

– Monolithic apps work very well in a number of different use cases

– Server rendered templates with sprinkles of JavaScript

– There’s an API component but it’s for a public subscriber API to download videos

– The site is very speedy from an end user’s POV even without Turbolinks

– Waiting a bit longer before trying out Live View

– Pretty severe RSI limited development to 10 hours a week for a while

– PostgreSQL is the database of choice

– nginx is being used, primarily for handling Let’s Encrypt certificates

– nginx is also used to serve static files and deal with compression

– Docker is not being used in development, but it’s part of the deploy process

– Going over previous ways the app was deployed with distillery and edeliver

– Going over the current deployment method which still uses edeliver

– GitLab CI / CD helps push code to production with Docker and edeliver

– Docker isn’t used in production, processes are managed with systemd

– The server was just upgraded to run Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

– Everything (including the database) is running on 1 server on DigitalOcean

– Render is an interesting Heroku alternative that Mark might use next

– The server is manually configured but using Ansible is in the works

– Do everything manually first and then automate afterwards when needed

– Managed database service vs self hosting your own database

– Logging events into your own database vs using another service

– Using DigitalOcean’s built in monitoring dashboard

– It’s hosted on the $10 / month server with 1 CPU core and 2 GB of memory

– Using ETS with a custom GenServer for caching certain page responses

– It held up after many people slammed his site using various benchmark tools

– One bottleneck was compiling Markdown into HTML on each page load

– Amazon SES is being used to send transactional emails out

– Marketing emails are done with Mailchimp but that’s being moved to ConvertKit

– Using Stripe to handle subscription payments, and PayPal is done manually

– Barrier of entry for handling payments is going up with things like SCA

– Logging is old school, just hop on the server and check out the log files

– Taking advantage of DigitalOcean’s built in alerting system

– Using Let’s Encrypt for issuing SSL certificates with the Certbot tool

– DNS records are being hosted on DigitalOcean

– Getting notified by email if your SSL certificates are expiring soon

– Handling disasters with daily and weekly automated backups

– There’s lots of ways to backup a database, use the one that works best for you

– Database backups are being saved on DO Spaces (S3 compatible object storage)

– There’s no URL based health checks on the app itself but that may change soon

– Sometimes you can’t believe your site actually works because you don’t get alerts

– Best tips? Keep your code and infrastructure simple early on and ship your app

– Region based discount had a display bug, but developers (as end users) are forgiving

– You can find Mark @AlchemistCamp on Twitter and check out his new podcast