In this episode of Running in Production, Matt Oliver goes over building
a chat platform with Akka, Scala and React Native. It’s hosted on DigitalOcean
with Kubernetes and has been running in production since 2013.

Matt talks about rewriting his app a few times, handling tens of thousands of
nightly TV shows, going all-in with Kubernetes, using Terraform, understanding
it’ll take a while to learn things along the way and more.

Topics Include

• 4:55 – Going from PHP to Scala to Node and back to Scala for the back-end


• 15:09 – Tens of thousands of channels are created every night


• 16:39 – What exactly is Akka and the actor model


• 19:55 – Websockets are being used quite heavily


• 23:04 – A few Scala libraries that were useful for building this platform


• 27:31 – There’s a mobile front-end using React Native for Android and iOS


• 31:30 – Storing and caching TV listings with Gracenote


• 34:53 – Roughly ~25k lines of Scala and ~11k on the front-end in 2 repos


• 39:41 – Motivation for using React Native instead of using native languages


• 45:55 – How to deal with large show TVs with a massive audience


• 50:28 – The app is basically 3 screens


• 54:34 – Handling user uploaded gifs and link submissions


• 1:00:09 – What it was like building out the React Native front-end


• 1:05:54 – Reasons for picking DigitalOcean and using Kubernetes


• 1:14:44 – Most of the infrastructure is managed by Terraform


• 1:16:57 – What it was like to go from not using Kubernetes to going all-in with it


• 1:24:21 – (3) 2 GB of memory / 2 CPU core servers are running the cluster


• 1:26:12 – What it’s like developing a new feature and deploying it to production


• 1:34:28 – The database is backed up on a schedule and before schema changes


• 1:39:21 – Prometheus, Grafana, Kamon and Sentry are used for metrics and monitoring


• 1:43:41 – Pingdom is used for an external site monitor


• 1:44:31 – It took about a month to get confident in using Kubernetes


• 1:49:29 – Best tips? It’s going to take a while, hang in there


• 1:53:06 – Writing comments for your future self while learning


• 1:54:34 – Matt is on Twitter and most socials as @halfmatthalfcat and @couchmatehq

Links

📄 References

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_program_guide


• https://www.gracenote.com/on-entertainment-tv-listings/


• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query


• https://tenor.com/

⚙️ Tech Stack

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