Operations

When I started setting up the cloud infrastructure for poketto.me, I didn’t give much thought to costs. I thought it was such a small project that it just wouldn’t matter. I launched a #CloudSQL (MySQL) database with pretty much the default settings and was quite happy with it – until I checked the billing dashboard a couple of days later and realised that I was already spending almost €4 per day on the database alone. 120 euros per month just for a few MySQL tables? That couldn’t be right. ...

Put simply, serving web requests properly in Python is not easy. poketto.me uses a fairly basic off-the-shelf stack (#Flask as a web framework and #SocketIO for websocket communication), and you would never guess the issues you could encounter with it. For starters, Flask comes with a built-in web server (“werkzeug”), which is convenient for development, but absolutely not for production (it even warns you in bright red). 🧵It runs on a single thread – I'm not kidding. This means it can only handle one web request at a time. If that request involves any actual work, such as extracting web content, it cannot handle any other requests at the same time. ...