– From 2,000 requests a day to 2.5 million requests a day in a few years

– WordPress is still really popular

– Motivation for using Express and Node

– TJ Holowaychuk created Express and he was a JavaScript legend

– Express is still actively developed by the community

– The back-end is using ES6 JavaScript

– There’s 100,000+ lines of code and Jack wrote it all

– What does Kernl allow WordPress developers to do?

– The 100k lines of code includes and back-end and front-end

– The code is split up across a few git repos

– Breaking a few things out into services came naturally, it wasn’t forced

– A new WordPress site health monitor service will be coming out soon

– Part of the reason for choosing Angular with an API back-end was to learn new things

– MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis and Node

– Some of the Node services are using TypeScript

– Is it worth it to refactor the other services to use TypeScript? Probably not

– This whole app is a long running side project that’s worked on after hours

– Trello plays a huge role in helping Jack organize what to do

– Jack’s super power is being able to context switch really quickly

– DigitalOcean is being used to host the site and Stripe handles payments

– Pusher is used to update a counter on the home page with websockets

– SendGrid is used to send out emails

– Stripe isn’t configured for SCA, he’s still on an API version from 2016 (but it works)

– What does log management look like with 75 million requests a month?

– DigitalOcean’s managed load balancer replaces what nginx used to do

– Docker isn’t being used in development or production

– Jack’s been running his own Linux servers since 2002

– Ubuntu 18.04 (LTS) is being used on all of Kernl’s servers

– What will upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) look like for you?

– (2) $5 / month DigitalOcean servers power the entire web application

– Node serves static files directly, but there’s very few requests for static assets

– 1 static asset is served from S3 because it needs to handle massive traffic spikes

– What about DigitalOcean Spaces? It’s just not stable enough (and I agree)

– How code gets from Jack’s dev box into production

– Deployments are done on multiple servers at once in parallel with no down time

– How zero down time deploys are handled without a complicated set up

– His main competitor had hours of down time so that had to be avoided

– Secrets get transferred straight from dev to the server over SSH / SCP

– Have you thought on what would need to change if 2 devs worked on the project?

– The song and dance of making “Fix CI” commits until it’s actually fixed

– All customer data is backed up daily and things can be recreated quickly

– Configuration management takes time to learn which is why it’s done by hand

– Pingdom will send out alerts if the site goes down, it gets checked every minute

– Switching from Apache to nginx in the middle of a 10 hour car ride with his wife

– Experiencing problems like that really helps you learn what not to do

– DigitalOcean alerts are also set up for additional system resource alerts

– Block Storage is also being used (it’s an extra drive you can connect to a server)

– Best tips? If you’re not comfortable with a technology, don’t self host it

– Jack pays $65-100 a month for DigitalOcean hosting which includes everything

– Biggest mistake? Probably using MongoDB because his schema is very relational

– Check out Kernl and you can also find Jack on Twitter @jackslingerland