Docker

• Go because it's easy and simple, facilitates collaboration , and also it's fast, scalable, powerful.
• Visual Studio Code because it has one of the most sophisticated Go language support plugins.
• Vim because it's Vim
• Git because it's Git
• Docker and Docker Compose because it's quick and easy to have reproducible builds/tests with them
• Arch Linux because Docker for Mac/Win is a disaster for the human nervous system, and Arch is the coolest Linux distro so far
• Stack Overflow because of Copy-Paste Driven Development
• JavaScript and Python when a something needs to be coded for yesterday
• PhpStorm because it saves me like 300 "Ctrl+F" key strokes a minute
• cURL because terminal all the way

Docker is used as a key part of our new type of infrastructure that relies exclusively on containers. We prefer docker since it offers us all we need in a very stable and battle-proven manner.

I have got a small radio service running on Node.js . Front end is written with React and packed with Webpack . I use Docker for my #DeploymentWorkflow along with Docker Swarm and GitLab CI on a single Google Compute Engine instance, which is also a runner itself. Pretty unscalable decision but it works great for tiny projects. The project is available on https://fridgefm.com

We are in the process of building a modern content platform to deliver our content through various channels. We decided to go with Microservices architecture as we wanted scale. Microservice architecture style is an approach to developing an application as a suite of small independently deployable services built around specific business capabilities. You can gain modularity, extensive parallelism and cost-effective scaling by deploying services across many distributed servers. Microservices modularity facilitates independent updates/deployments, and helps to avoid single point of failure, which can help prevent large-scale outages. We also decided to use Event Driven Architecture pattern which is a popular distributed asynchronous architecture pattern used to produce highly scalable applications. The event-driven architecture is made up of highly decoupled, single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events.

To build our #Backend capabilities we decided to use the following: 1. #Microservices - Java with Spring Boot , Node.js with ExpressJS and Python with Flask 2. #Eventsourcingframework - Amazon Kinesis , Amazon Kinesis Firehose , Amazon SNS , Amazon SQS , AWS Lambda 3. #Data - Amazon RDS , Amazon DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , MongoDB Atlas

To build #Webapps we decided to use Angular 2 with RxJS

#Devops - GitHub , Travis CI , Terraform , Docker , Serverless

We are planning to choose Docker since it will allow us to build and install libraries and dependencies with ease. Its extensive use in the world will be helpful to provide us with useful discussion boards. This will be the first time any member of the dev team will be using Docker as part of their application. Given the limited readings, we have been able to do about it in the time we had, we a really excited to get to work with it. It seems to have a lot of potential that we would like to explore as a team. Another reason is that our dev team currently only has access to Windows machines and we want our application to be system agnostic. Using Docker will also help us limit the number of CI minutes our application requires.

We use GraphQL for the communication between our Minecraft-Proxies/Load-Balancers and our global Minecraft-Orchestration-Service JCOverseer .

This connection proved to be especially challenging, as there were so many available options and very specific requirements and we tried our hardest to put as little complexity into this interface as possible.

Initially we considered designing our very own Netty based Packet-Protocol. While the performance of this approach probably would've been noteworthy, we would have had to write a lot of packets as the individual payloads would differ a lot and for the protocol specification a new project would've been needed, so we scrapped that idea.

Our second idea was to use a combination of Redis Key/Value store (in particular the ability to write whole, complex sets as the values of keys) for existing data, Redis Pub-Sub for the synchronization of new/changed/deleted data and a Vert.x based REST API for the mutation requests of the clients. While this would certainly have been possible, we decided against it, as redis offers no real other data types than strings and typing was important to us.

So we finally settled for GraphQL as it would allow us to define dynamic queries and mutations and additionally has subscriptions in store, so we would only need one component instead of three separate. The proxies register as subscribers to the server changes channel and fetch the current data set in advance. If they need to request changes, this is done through a mutation in GraphQL aswell.

The status of the invidiual servers is fetched through Docker healthchecks and a Docker client in the orchestration service, that subscribes to changed HEALTHINESS values in docker. If a service becomes unhealthy it is unregistered and synchronized through GraphQL . The healthcheck is comparable to a ping packet that expects a response in a given time frame.