sondehub
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Release retrospect and infrastructure plans
🕑 Added 2021-05-19 12:37:34 +0000 UTCFirst off, thank you to all that have signed up! Still a long way before all the infrastructure costs are covered, but we are getting closer. Tell your radiosonde chaser friends to sign up!
I wanted to quickly run through how the launch of the v2 interface has gone, and what the next steps are in the project.
Launch of the v2 interface generally went pretty well. There were some use cases and issues that we didn't account for until after launch however those were fixed up pretty quickly! Most of these were minor things like the usual short urls (sondehub.org/{serial number} didn't quite work.
Running off a cloud with a good CDN really helps as if the backend starts to struggle users only see the issue as increased latency rather than complete failure.
Our infrastructure was able to handle the load correctly which was great, and I'm feeling pretty confident that it'll be ok, even if included in something like a NOAA livestream or the like.
We've also seen some third party developers building in support for sondehub which is great!
So onto the future plans:
1. Reducing cost.
At the moment we use 3 AWS IoT actions to upload to S3 in different filename formats. But switching this out to a single Lambda function I think we can save a significant amount of cost here.
It's also highly likely that the IoT Action to SNS topic will get replaced out, and incorporated into the Lambda function that already exists for push the data onto AWS IoT bus. There's actually a bit of opportunity here to introduce some cost saving by batching up several packets into a larger request which could help on SNS and SQS costs.
2. Updating Terraform Infrastructure project
Our infrastructure is deployed as code using a tool called terraform. It allows us to automate deployments of the backend and all the cloud services we require. During the launch a bunch of changes were made that haven't been reflected in the terraform configuration that we have on GitHub. That'll need to be updated, and hopefully improved on so we can launch test stacks for development.
3. Backend Refactor
The backend probably didn't get enough time invested into it. A lot of the code isn't really in a maintainable state so I'd like to go through and rewrite that to be much easier to work on.
API structure needs some focus as well, the majority of the endpoints that have been built are based around getting the SondeHub Tracker UI to work and not around developers usability.
