muchezz / devops_challenge

Challenge

Software Developers have been tasked with creating an interface for collecting user feedback and mailing it. They have chosen to separate the user interface from the mailing process using separate webserver and worker service as described in the Asynchronous Tasks with Django and Celery section.

As a Devops engineer, you are asked to accomplish the following tasks to make the application production ready:

1. Production Readiness

Identify and separate points of concern by

• Implementing a production webserver.
• Implementing a reverse proxy to serve traffic.
• Implementing a production database.
• Managed services to handle automatic start/restarts of processes.

2. Containerization

In order for developers to submit an exact replica of their application to QA for testing, create a containerized stack with easily deployable artifacts via a configuration file(yaml/json/etc).

3. Deploy to Cloud

Using minikube as your cloud infrastructure, setup a k8s cluster and deploy the now containerized stack, with enhancements including:

• Load balancer
• High availability/redundancy
• Application logging and monitoring
• CI/CD pipeline
• Documentation
• etc

Asynchronous Tasks with Django and Celery

Example project for integrating Celery and Redis into a Django application. This repository holds the code for the Real Python Asynchronous Tasks With Django and Celery tutorial.

Setup (Linux)

To try the project, set up a virtual box environment. Install VirtualBox and Vagrant

Note: Remember to activate Virtualization for VirtualBox to work - https://www.nakivo.com/blog/use-virtualbox-quick-overview/

The provided Vagrantfile will:

1. Download ubuntu 18.04 and install in a virtual box.
2. Install required dependencies.
3. Forward required ports to serve the application outside of the box.
4. Install and start Redis as a task queue.
5. Copy the project code into the box and install project requirements.

$ vagrant up --provider virtualbox

Running the application

The application consists 2 parts, a rudimentary Django webserver and Celery worker.

Once the box has be provisioned, you need to start the 2 processes to be run together side-by-side:

1. Django
2. Celery

Open two different terminal windows and ssh into the vagrant box with vagrant ssh:

Django app

$ cd /opt/devops_challenge_app
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ (venv) python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Celery worker

$ cd /opt/devops_challenge_app
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ (venv) python -m celery -A django_celery worker

When all three processes are running, you can go to localhost:8080/ and submit a feedback response. Celery will simulate a work-intensive process and send an email at the end of it. You'll see the email message show up in the log stream on the terminal window where the Celery worker is running.