PPH l33t

Our Tech Stack 2020

I last wrote about our tech stack 2 years ago. There hasn’t been a huge change. We’ve been moving slow and steady. Our migration from PHP/Yii to JavaScript/React is not yet complete but we’re slowly getting there. 3 years on and we’re 40% done. Migrating…

Testing nginx rewrite performance

Our website is 12 years old and over time we have accured quite a few URL changes. Mainly due to terminlogy changes and SEO restructures. 819 to be exact. They are rewrite rules in a nginx config file. This is a lot of regular expressions…

Our Tech Stack 2018

Has our Tech stack remained the same since 2 years ago when I last wrote about it? Hell no! Our website pages are now served by 2 distinct tech stacks. We use a AWS ALB to sniff the request and send either to our “Legacy”…

Working around the lack of volumes-from in Kubernetes

We have been running containerised apps since early 2014 so in theory, moving to Kubernetes should be easy. The problem is that we currently make use of the –volumes-from docker flag to share volumes between containers of the same app. For example, a common pattern…

Our Tech Stack

I was recently asked about our Tech Stack by someone looking to join the development team. I was about to point them to a previous blog post when I realised it was 4 years old so needs a update… I still consider ourselves as fundamentally…

AWS Lambda development pipeline

Overview The past year, PeoplePerHour has entered the microservices arena, containerising its platform and separating it into services. On the process of doing so, we realised how much we lacked message buses and long running daemons to process requests, either real time or in an…

New CoreOS out – list dangling volumes

A new stable version of CoreOS, the Operating System we use on our AWS instances, came out recently – v899 and docker was upgraded from v1.7 to v1.9.1. This means, it’s now much easier to find docker volumes that are no longer being used by…