In this episode of Running in Production, Vlad Radulescu goes over creating a
game directory site with Ruby on Rails. It’s hosted on AWS and has been up
and running since 2014.

Vlad talks about having thousands of active users, interfacing with a few game
platform APIs, running millions of Sidekiq jobs, storing 10+ billion database
records, keeping things as a monolithic app, deploying the web app to 1 server
and lots more.

Topics Include

• 6:30 – Motivation for switching from PHP to Ruby on Rails


• 7:07 – Figuring out which gaming API to implement first and how their APIs are


• 10:27 – Reverse engineering undocumented API calls from the Windows Steam client


• 12:18 – Using a separate database for each gaming platform provider


• 15:05 – A few useful features of Rails that’s being used and Stimulus Reflex


• 20:19 – Switching from Webpacker to using Vite


• 23:14 – Using Slim instead of ERB and a few other gems being used


• 25:29 – It’s a single monolithic Rails app that’s using namespaces


• 28:36 – A lot of the time spent developing this app is working with the game APIs


• 31:00 – Using Sidekiq, a billion (!) gamer activities stored and millions of Sidekiq jobs


• 34:18 – It’s hosted on a single AWS T2.large instance (4 vCPUs / 16 GB memory)


• 36:13 – The database is on an R6g.large with 10+ billion records


• 39:14 – Ansible was used to set up the EC2 instance and it’s running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS


• 41:13 – A couple of AWS resources being used


• 43:01 – The process to ship a feature from development to production


• 44:16 – Switching to using TailwindCSS in a nicely controlled way


• 47:57 – At the moment the site is free with no desire to make it pay to win


• 49:55 – Hosting is $1,500 pounds a month and it’s been running for free for 7+ years


• 51:43 – There’s 7 terabytes of S3 storage and daily database backups


• 55:59 – 50ish mini servers spread across Heroku’s free tier to bypass API rate limits


• 59:45 – Being dialed into the ops side of things but there’s room for improvement


• 1:00:54 – Keeping up with a full date job and a long running passion project


• 1:02:25 – Best tips? Don’t forget to plan things out


• 1:05:56 – You can find Vlad on Twitter and Games Directory will be open source soon

Links

📄 References

• https://www.giantbomb.com/api/


• https://www.telerik.com/fiddler


• https://games.directory/u/pacmakaveli (Vlad’s profile)

⚙️ Tech Stack

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