Description

This repo configures infrastructure for the https://dap.ps/ service.

The service is split into two stages:

Stage	With CDN	Without CDN
prod	https://prod.dap.ps/	https://raw.prod.dap.ps/
dev	https://dev.dap.ps/	https://raw.dev.dap.ps/

The prod environment is CNAMEed to dap.ps domain.

Technical Details

Site

The infrastructure is hosted on AWS and consists of 5 main elements:

• ELB - Load balancers
• EB - Node.js App hosting
• EC2 - MongoDB cluster
• S3 - MongoDB backups & Terraform state
• SES - Mail forwarding
• CF - CDN
• R53 - Route53 DNS

All the AWS parts are provisioned and managed with Terraform and the MongoDB cluster configured with Ansible.

The dap.ps domain is registered via Gandi DNS provider and is managed with AWS Route53 Hosted Zone by changing the Name Servers with help from Gandi support. See dns.tf for more details.

EMail

There are no mailboxes for dap.ps domain. We forward emails using AWS Lambda and AWS SES. You can change the forwarding rules by editing the defaultConfig object in files/sesforwarder.js and adding Verified Emails in mail.tf.

Usage

Creation of both dev and prod stages is as simple as:

terraform init
terraform apply

And then configure the MongoDB hosts using ansible:

ansible-playbook ansible/dev.yml
ansible-playbook ansible/prod.yml

Known Issues

• The ElasticBeanstalk environments can fail when being recreated
  • This is mostly due to AWS being slow at destorying resources and their race conditions
• There is no easy way of making ElasticBeanstalk spread geographically
  • The only way seems to have multiple EB environments linked via ELB
• CDN can be slow to pick up updates to ElasticBeanstalk application
  • Invalidating the CloudFront cache fixes the issue

TODO

• #4 - [prod] Geographically spread hosts
• #11 - [prod] MongoDB Web UI
• #13 - [prod] Stress test infrastructure

Links

These helped me during work on this setup:

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/eb-cli3.html
• https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/deploy-app-command-line-elastic-beanstalk/
• https://medium.com/@vygandas/how-to-deploy-your-nodejs-app-on-amazon-elastic-beanstalk-aws-eb-with-circleci-short-tutorial-d8210d2a7f0c
• https://realpython.com/deploying-a-django-app-to-aws-elastic-beanstalk/