Backend Platform Work - BillionOysterProject/digital-platform-beta GitHub Wiki

In order to create a digital platform that would allow for more stability, flexibility, and community participation going forward, in 2018 we undertook a complete re-write of the existing BOP Digital Platform.

Work on the Original Platform

But first, a pro-bono contributor, @ghetzel, conducted an analysis of the existing platform to help BOP staff understand what the original contractors had delivered, since this documentation did not exist. He also helped us reduce our digital infrastructure costs, mitigate risk, and stabilize the original platform. This included:

  • Providing background information on the project the original platform is forked from, MEAN.JS, and detailing challenges experienced by the tech community with the frontend framework, AngularJS version 1.

  • Reviewing our existing Amazon Web Services configurations, and helping the product manager come up with a more appropriately scaled, cost-saving plan while the platform was not under active development (moving from three medium EC2 instances [for Dev, Staging, and Prod] to a micro instance for Dev and a medium for Prod, eliminating Staging), and executing that plan by making the changes in AWS.

  • Advising on switching over ownership of contractor-owned platform accounts to accounts managed by BOP staff.

  • Setting up a new configuration for Codeship, the original platform's deployment service.

  • Setting up a new configuration in mLab, and performing a database migration for both the development and production databases.

  • Migrated public DNS from contractor-managed services to BOP-managed services and added Cloudflare CDN and DDoS protection.

  • Helping troubleshoot and fix dozens of bugs with the original platform.

  • Advising on and performing code reviews of BOP staff's code.

  • Advising on and performing maintenance like renewing SSL certificates.

  • Creation of a service delivery architecture diagram to help onboard new contractors or pro-bono contributors: service delivery architecture diagram of the original platform

Prep for the New Beta Platform

Next, @ghetzel helped us identify goals for the new platform architecture, including:

  • the ability to swap out/add new databases (to address issues caused by the original platform's database not being a relational database)
  • a language-agnostic templating engine that would allow BOP to source frontend developers from varied development backgrounds (instead of constraining development to one specific framework)