• 1 Authentication microservice written in Flask (custom token-based authentication)
• 1 Redis service (where temp auth tokens are stored)
• 1 Nginx Load Balancer (serving the 2 parent services below)
• 2 Parent server apps written in Django (Where most of the backend logic happens - pulls data from various API's into one place)
• 1 Postgres service
• 1 Messaging microservice written in Flask
• 1 User/Profile microservice written in Flask

When this project was live, the path to production looked like the following:

• Each service has it's own Github Repository
• When a pull request is initiated against any one of the repositories, a new build is triggered in CircleCI
• If all tests pass, the pull request is merged into master
• Github service hooks notify Docker Hub to build a new Docker image.
• Web hooks running on EC2 detect when a new image is available on Docker Hub.
• If a new image is recognized, it is pulled down from Docker Hub and automatically deployed to the correct AWS instance via Docker.

Since this project is no longer live, I made some changes to the above steps outlined below:

• The entire project (consisting of all the microservices and build/deploy infrastructure) is now contained within a single repository.
• All the services above are mapped out in a docker-compose.yml with some small tweaks that enable a single-click production deploy.
• Included is the Dockerrun.aws.json used to single-click deploy to AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Extensive use of environment variables and automation scripting to handle deployment from scratch (ie: deploying/configuring postgres with postGIS, populating database with location data, setting permissions, linking services, etc.)
• Using Ansible in place of pip to install application dependencies
• Static assetts were moved from an S3 bucket to the repository itself

cannablr uses a number of open source projects to work properly

• Flask - a Python microframework!
• Django - a high level Python web framework
• jQuery - duh
• Userena - a Django library for custom user profiles/permissions
• Twitter Bootstrap - great UI boilerplate for modern web apps
• masonry.js - a js library for vertically positioning UI elements
• Docker - containers for deploying applications

cannablr requires Docker to run.

Clone the repo and it's as simple as docker-compose up.

$ git clone https://github.com/donnaloia/cannablr.git
$ cd cannablr
$ docker-compose build
$ docker-compose up

For production environments...

$ git clone https://github.com/donnaloia/cannablr.git
$ cd cannablr
$ docker-compose build
$ docker-compose up

Now What?

$ docker-compose ps
$ docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' nginx

Curl or visit this ip address in your browser (port 8000) - the web app should be running and fully functional!

$ docker-compose scale parentserver=2

or...

$ docker-compose scale parentserver=10

The nginx.conf has been edited to automatically detect when a new instance of parentserver has been added upstream. We can now add multiple instances of parentserver on the fly, and nginx will automatically load balance between them. Pretty cool!

• Write MOAR Tests
• The Flask Auth service is currently running using Flask's built in http server - This is obviously not production friendly
• Add readme's for each microservice with a map of API endpoints

Free Software, Hell Yeah!