Deployment notes

[kayhide]

I open this issue to keep track of what we did about deployment.
This issue will be closed when we have successfully done our first deployment.

[kayhide]

from #1

Some sort of deployment infrastructure. It'd be great to have an easy way to deploy to AWS. I'm imaging that we have basically the following:

• one machine on EC2 running the servant api
• one machine acting as a nix builder (we could potentially just use the same ec2 instance as the servant api for the proof-of-concept)
• a database where we cache negative build results, web logs, etc. Maybe AWS dynamodb, since it is easy to use and cheap?
• an S3 bucket to use a nix binary cache
• somewhere to host the static html documentation (just use github??)

We could definitely do something else here (like containerizing the servant api and nix builder), but for now we should probably just do the simplest thing that works. Using a hosted, scalable nix builder like https://nixbuild.net/ might be nice in the future (but I have no idea how much it would end up costing).

[kayhide]

Dennis was saying that NixOps won't be a good idea.

[kayhide]

NixOS AMIs are available:
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Install_NixOS_on_Amazon_EC2

[kayhide]

Currently I am thinking of:

• Provision EC2 instance for an app server and S3 bucket for binary cache (use Teraform)
• Setup binary cache on S3
• On update of the main branch:
  • Load code and build it (nix build)
  • Start (or replace if already running) the app

Since this setup assumes a binary cache, build process should be relatively light.

The binary cache for the app may be good to be separated from that for builds.

[cdepillabout]

The general architecture that we're thinking of will be:

• A single EC2 instance running our web-server (and also holding our sqlite db). The EC2 instance will request builds to nixbuild.net.

• Build artifacts will be cached in an S3 bucket acting as a Nix cache.

• (optional) Use route53 to manage binplz.dev so we can easily update the A records to point to the ip addr of our EC2 instance.

We're thinking of setting up this architecture with Terraform, although we haven't yet decided how to deploy our server binary, or setup the EC2 instance with configuration files (like credentials to access the nixbuild.net service).

We're planning on creating an organization in AWS (with a single master user), and then creating admin users for the three of us.