Forem: Yehor Herasymchuk

Dots Platform will process millions of orders without servers and cloud hosting.

Yehor Herasymchuk — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 18:49:36 +0000

We started to develop tech for the restaurant and retail industry more than nine years ago. First - for our businesses, then - as a SaaS for hyperlocal commerce, Dots Platform. Year by year, we are iteratively improving our product using cutting-edge technologies.

And today, we brought the Platform to one more new level. Happy to share that we've transferred all our server infrastructure to a serverless one. We no longer use servers, leveraging an inventive tech stack + Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda.

Please feel free to follow our co-founder and CTO, Yehor Herasymchuk. He regularly posts many exciting things about tech and can share our experience building a serverless infrastructure.

5 things you should know about Laravel Vapor

Yehor Herasymchuk — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 16:06:22 +0000

We've been using Laravel Vapor for almost 3 years now, and it has truly been a game-changer for us. Before discovering Vapor, we struggled with the scaling and management of our web applications. But since switching to this serverless deployment platform, we've been able to focus on building and improving our applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

Laravel Vapor is an AWS Lambda-based serverless application platform that enables developers to quickly deploy and manage applications on-demand.
It offers a streamlined development process, from code deployment to scaling with load requirements.
Vapor uses a powerful serverless paradigm that eliminates the need for servers and provides restful APIs for data streams.
It is designed to be highly fault tolerant and secure, and provides a wide range of powerful features such as continuous integration, auto-scaling, logging and monitoring.
Laravel Vapor is easy to use and offers developers a great way to reduce operational costs, improve development speed and maintain consistent quality standards.

In conclusion, Laravel Vapor has proven to be a game-changer for us as it provides a seamless way to deploy and manage web applications on-demand. Its integration with AWS Lambda, streamlined development process, and serverless paradigm have eliminated the need for servers and allowed us to focus on building and improving our applications. The platform is highly fault tolerant, secure, and provides a wide range of powerful features such as continuous integration, auto-scaling, logging, and monitoring. Overall, Laravel Vapor is an easy-to-use, cost-effective solution that has helped us maintain consistent quality standards and improve development speed.

You are welcome to ask me any question about serverless

How we deployed 9 years old project to AWS Lambda

Yehor Herasymchuk — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:03:45 +0000

It was the most challenging task for me since we migrated to AWS in 2020. It took more than 3 months to migrate completely.

And here are 7 parts of my checklist and working plan how to do this without downtime and crashes.

1️⃣Part 1. Development and QA

(November - December)

Clean code from large files
Remove all unnecessary js/images/css
Optimize page speed
Configure dockerfile
Prepare stage environment
Verify on test data that everything is working
Fix bugs

2️⃣Part 2. Pre-Production:

02.01-18.01.2023

Prepare preproduction (same data but different urls)
Disable queues/scheduler for pre production (to prevent problems with data - data
Verify on real data that
Fix issues

3️⃣Part 3. Deploy code

17.01.2023

Deploy New code to old servers
Verify everything is working
Monitor full day and fix issues

4️⃣Part 4. Deploy Queues Workers and Scheduler the production

18.01.2023

Reconfigure queues to push to SQS (on old servers)
Deploy only queues workers and scheduler on Vapor
Stop old Redis queues workers (on old servers)
Verify everything is working
Monitor logs : Full day

5️⃣Part 5. Deploy http: internal api and accounts management

19.01 (Friday 🤯)

Reconfigure preproduction domains in Vapor to production
Change DNS Cname on Cloudflare
Verify everything is working
Monitor load and logs full day + weekends

6️⃣Part 6. Deploy admin (orders monitoring + content management system)

24.01.2023

Reconfigure preproduction domains in Vapor to production
Change DNS Cname on Cloudflare
Verify everything is working
Monitor load and logs full day

7️⃣Part 7. Monitoring and optimization

24.01-01.02

Optimize order monitoring pages: reduce html volume(lambda limit - 5mb per page)
Optimize archive statistics reports - lambda limit - 30 seconds timeout
Monitor load

It is just a quick overview of what was done, and there were a lot of challenges on each step. 5 and 6 were the easiest one. And 4 was the most stressful for me since it was tremendous change of architecture and there wasn’t chance for mistakes.

Despite of overwhelming count of challenges it was one of the most valuable contribution in the Dots architecture and future development. Therefore, I can tell a lot of Stories about difficulties and there solutions.

All in all, good team work helped us to find all issues before they went live. And a good plan ensured to deploy with minimal risks.