– 20 developers (~50 people total) run just the developer.va.gov site

– The platform has been up and running for 18+ months

– Motivation for using Ruby on Rails

– The application is running Rails 5.2, but they want to upgrade to 6.x

– It’s currently a single Rails monolith but it may get broken up at some point

– What’s it like working on a government contract?

– The app is roughly 140,000+ lines of code which is API driven and uses React

– The entire application is open source on GitHub (to my surprise)

– What makes React a good fit for this application? Complicated forms mostly

– The VA has their own UI design specifications publicly posted

– Tailwind CSS isn’t being used but Charley likes it

– Docker is being used in production and it runs on AWS GovCloud

– PostgreSQL and Redis are used but there’s not a ton of data in the DB

– How AWS GovCloud is different than the regular AWS platform

– It’s all on EC2 instances that’s managed by Terraform and Ansible

– They use Auto Scaling Groups, CloudWatch, SNS, Elasticsearch and more

– Sentry.io is being used for error reporting

– Getting external services approved for usage on AWS GovCloud

– On average 10-15 t3.large instances power the web servers, but it fluctuates a lot

– The EC2 instances are running the Amazon Linux 2 AMI

– Each deploy takes about 20 minutes to run from start to finish

– Charley walks us through deploying from development to production

– So far he hasn’t had to get woken up at 3am (except from his 2 year old)

– Jenkins controls their CI pipeline, which is kicked off from git pushing code

– With multiple instances and an ELB, there are zero downtime deploys

– Database migrations can sometimes get complicated

– They aim for 90%+ test coverage

– Between 2 and 5 developers typically review code before it gets merged

– Their team works remotely and waiting for builds can get interesting

– Rubocop analyzes the code base along with Code Climate

– A “development” environment exists on AWS but developers run the code locally

– VCR is used to help cache remote API calls to other VA systems

– Each API has its own version

– Attempting to get rid of the need for fax machines

– All of the data is backed up and recovery would be quick if something went wrong

– How is Terraform being used?

– Best tips? With undocumented APIs, write tests and pry into the details

– Biggest mistakes that were corrected? The mocking layer

– Every developer is accountable for their work and will help to resolve issues

– Charley’s consulting company Oddball is hiring and you can also find him on Twitter