Architecture

CI/CD Pipeline

• The deployment pipeline is triggered by a push to the main or staging branch.
• To avoid additional costs on AWS, we build the frontend and backend images on the GitHub Actions runner and push them to the Docker Hub.
• Our AWS EC2 instances pull the images and restart the containers.

Production Architecture

• This architecture diagram represents a high-level overview, some details such as certificate management are not shown.
• To reduce bandwidth costs when serving media files, /media serves as a proxy to the S3 bucket, using presigned URLS, and cached using NGINX.

Development Architecture

• The development environment can be brought up with ./run.sh, it also has additional containers for testing which can be brought up with ./test.sh.
• We make use of a self-signed certificate for local development, which is stored in the nginx container and used by the frontend container.
• Our backend container waits for the mysql container to be ready before starting the Django application.
• Our backend container is setup to use the devuser and devpassword credentials in .env by default.