In this episode of Running in Production, Chris Samiullah goes over building a
video course hosting platform with FastAPI, Strapi and Gatsby. It’s hosted on
ECS along with a bunch of AWS resources. It’s been running in production since
early 2021.

Chris talks about combining a Gatsby static site with FastAPI, using AWS
Fargate, streaming videos with Cloudflare, supporting both Stripe and Paddle,
using a bit of Serverless Lambdas and tons more.

Topics Include

• 3:19 – Hiring outside contractors to tackle setting up the infrastructure


• 5:05 – Motivation for choosing Strapi, FastAPI, React, Gatsby and more


• 9:37 – Strapi is being used as a headless CMS for the student watching front-end


• 10:33 – Going over how the student watching experience is set up


• 14:20 – Creating a course preview with Fargate using sub-domains and DNS entries


• 16:35 – A couple Gatsby plugins that helped build the site


• 18:57 – A couple of Python libraries to help build out the FastAPI back-end


• 20:54 – Using Cloudflare for streaming the videos and Shaka as the video player


• 26:39 – Stripe and Paddle are being used to handle payments (including VAT)


• 37:35 – About 20k lines of Python and 10k lines of front-end / React code


• 39:53 – Everything is Dockerized, there’s PostgreSQL and an ALB too


• 43:30 – Using Let’s Encrypt and letting course owners hook up custom domain names


• 45:05 – Reasons for choosing AWS and ECS (hosting is about $100 to $150 a month)


• 51:45 – Having a dev (staging) server and production in different regions


• 53:27 – What it’s like coding things up in development and pushing them to production


• 58:42 – The dev experience for using AWS Lambdas and creating internal tooling


• 1:05:59 – On-boarding new authors (doing something that doesn’t scale but it works now)


• 1:10:33 – A public service announcement about database migrations


• 1:13:13 – FastAPI has been working very nicely


• 1:16:41 – Backing up the database and user generated files


• 1:19:56 – Using Sentry for tracking errors and getting notified over Slack


• 1:25:35 – Best tips? Pick a hosting infrastructure that fits your project


• 1:27:44 – Picking between ECS and EKS was left to the contractor


• 1:30:03 – Check out https://coursemaker.org/, Chris is on Twitter and LinkedIn too

Links

📄 References

• https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/conceptual/how-shadowing-works/


• https://github.com/encode/starlette


• http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

⚙️ Tech Stack

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