The CMS Front End for Lionel Trains' Products
with Nick Janetakis and Mark Miscavage
Running in Production · Nick Janetakis
July 6, 20201h 1m
Show Notes
In this episode of Running in Production, Mark Miscavage talks about building a site to display hundreds of thousands of full text searchable products for Lionel. The site is powered by Django with a custom open source CMS. It’s been up and running since 2015 and is hosted on AWS.
The agency Mark worked at developed 100+ Django sites, including sites for the Avatar movie along with Hunger Games.
Topics Include
- 3:43 – Building a custom CMS / Django admin and open sourcing the Scarlet library
- 9:16 – Hundreds of thousands of trains, cars and product SKUs are on the CMS driven site
- 13:27 – Motivation for making a monolithic Django app instead of using Magento
- 16:32 – Using Solr to full text search through hundreds of thousands of products
- 20:30 – It’s primarily a server rendered app using Django templates and Ember
- 25:04 – Master / slave PostgreSQL set up using RDS and they use other AWS resources
- 29:42 – Load balancing, dealing with thousands of visitors and heavily caching responses
- 33:53 – Writing a custom open source framework called red-fab-deploy to deploy the app
- 37:59 – The EC2 web servers are using Ubuntu and have t2.medium’ish specs
- 41:35 – Rsync’ing files over to the server, the entire deploy process and testing
- 50:16 – Backing up admin uploaded files and the database, along with using Sentry for errors
- 54:09 – Dealing with secret keys and code reviews while self hosting BitBucket
- 56:44 – Best tips? Start with a base application and server architecture to help estimates
- 58:44 – Also know when to ask for help (such as hiring a contractor or asking questions)
- 1:00:24 – You can find Mark on Twitter @chick3ndinn3r