The Largest River: Part 1 - First Steps to Building a Globally-Distributed Application

1

React

A React frontend sends traffic through an Nginx reverse proxy, to VMs running in multiple regions. Running VMs in multiple regions (once properly load-balanced) will result in shorter round trips, as well as enabling us to reroute traffic in the event of a region outage. These VMs are all running the same containerized Node.js process, which creates a connection to a YugabyteDB database. YugabyteDB is a Postgres-compliant, highly-available, distributed database. If you’d like to spin up an always-free single-node cluster for yourself, you can do so here.

#Javascript UI Libraries #JS Library #JavaScript Framework 775 social mentions

2

Kubernetes

While the precise features of the application are immaterial, the architecture is of primary importance. A lot of tools (and buzzwords) come to mind when trying to architect a modern web application. Assets can be served from a CDN to improve page load speed. A global load balancer can front all traffic, sending requests to the nearest server. Serverless functions and edge functions can be used to handle requests, eliminating the need to manage infrastructure altogether. Kubernetes can be deployed for container orchestration, networking and healing, amongst many other production-grade features. The list goes on.

#Developer Tools #DevOps Tools #Containers As A Service 279 social mentions

3

Google Cloud Load Balancing

While the precise features of the application are immaterial, the architecture is of primary importance. A lot of tools (and buzzwords) come to mind when trying to architect a modern web application. Assets can be served from a CDN to improve page load speed. A global load balancer can front all traffic, sending requests to the nearest server. Serverless functions and edge functions can be used to handle requests, eliminating the need to manage infrastructure altogether. Kubernetes can be deployed for container orchestration, networking and healing, amongst many other production-grade features. The list goes on.

#Web Servers #Web And Application Servers #Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy 10 social mentions

4

Google Container Registry

After countless hours of research and development, I’vedecided to run a Container-Optimized OS on Google Compute Engine VMs. These machines run images, which I’ve pushed to the Google Container Registry. As mentioned previously, this is helpful in that the same Docker images can be run locally and in production, with minimal differences in configuration.

#Code Collaboration #Git #Developer Tools 23 social mentions

5

Google Compute Engine

After countless hours of research and development, I’vedecided to run a Container-Optimized OS on Google Compute Engine VMs. These machines run images, which I’ve pushed to the Google Container Registry. As mentioned previously, this is helpful in that the same Docker images can be run locally and in production, with minimal differences in configuration.

#Cloud Computing #Cloud Infrastructure #VPS 15 social mentions