– Experiences with using Flask to build the site for the last 10+ years

– Traffic ranges from 20,000+ visitors a day to hundreds per month

– A simple 5 second cache can save your server from a huge traffic spike

– Motivation for using Flask after having used many different frameworks / languages

– It’s split into 2 services, one for the main app and one for analytics

– The main app is about 1,000 lines of Python code with 15 database tables

– Flask-Cache is used to cache the response of a few high traffic views

– Each service has its own git repo that is independently deployed

– Responses are sent out as server rendered templates using Jinja 2

– A custom admin dashboard was built up over the years and it was worth it

– Reducing page load speeds by lazy loading comic images as you scroll down

– Websockets are being used in the admin to auto-save content in a real-time editor

– MariaDB is being used as the main database and here’s why

– Search isn’t implemented yet but it’s the number 1 user feature request

– Having search allows you to get good insights on what folks are looking for

– Full page caching is done with the free and open source version of nginx

– gunicorn is being used for the Flask app server and it works fantastically

– Everything is inside of Docker, running in a Swarm cluster

– Docker Swarm was chosen over Kubernetes because Kubernetes was overkill

– 2 web app servers that are load balanced, 2 DB servers, Redis and a load balancer

– Celery isn’t being used but Redis is doing a few things

– Why Seth moved from AWS to DigitalOcean over the years

– The load balancer is on a 2 GB of memory / 50 GB SSD / 2 virtual CPUs server

– The app servers have 4 GB of memory / 4 virtual CPUs and a bit more SSD disk space

– The database server has 8 GB of memory / 4 virtual CPUs and a 128 GB SSD

– Everything is running smoothly and purs like a kitten with various amounts of traffic

– Seth uses the same database server for a few of his other sites

– A combo of Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 are running with intent to upgrade

– Seth’s upgrade process for when it comes time to upgrading Ubuntu to 20.04

– DigitalOcean’s load balancer wasn’t around when all of this was set up

– Everything was installed by hand on the servers but Seth likes Terraform and Puppet

– You don’t always need to upgrade to the latest tool that came out today

– Over time, the app was updated from Python 2.6 to 3.4+ which was painful

– How do you stay motivated working on a project that’s been going for 10+ years?

– Walking us through deploying code from development to production

– GitHub Actions are used for CI / CD and it’s all automated with a single git push

– Secrets are stored in DigitalOcean Spaces and then are built into images on demand

– Error reporting and logging are handled through flat file logs that get backed up

– Newsletters are sent through a semi-manual mail merge strategy with Google Sheets

– An RSS feed is also available and Pinterest provides a decent amount of traffic

– The database is backed up nightly and 30 days worth of backups are saved

– All of the comic assets are backed up on DropBox and the code is on GitHub

– If the servers were to get forcefully rebooted, some of them recover automatically

– Various DigitalOcean alarms are set up to do email notifications if things go bad

– Reddit is weird sometimes (the hug of death or down voted into oblivion)

– Using DigitalOcean and his comic reader community for determining site healthiness

– Best tips? Focus on doing something you’re passionate about, it really helps

– Picking the right tool for the job is an art form and lean on trusted tools

– One of Seth’s biggest mistakes was trying to build something fancy initially

– Another thing was chasing / building weird things that his users didn’t ask for

– Check out Seth’s webcomic he’s also on GitHub and InstaGram