Designing a High Availability Alert System

Miles Elliott

What is the best way to get information out there?

Easiest to Consume, Easiest to Post, Most Accessible

A Journey into

Leveraging What We've Got

and Making it as Effective as Possible

Volume I

The Development Chronicles

A Story

But First

>: (

Not so good

  • I'm expecting NC State but I'm seeing a lot of facebook
  • What is this popup?
  • Where is the information I came for?

?

  • It's There
  • Simplicity
  • Familiarity
  • Robust Servers

Some time later...

What about WordPress?

  • Nice Writing Experience
  • We have control
  • No Popups
  • Branded

Not a bad idea

  • Single Server
  • More Points of Failure
  • Some learning required
  • Dependent on the Environment

but...

Potential Pitfalls

  • Caching
  • Blacklisting IPs
  • Poorly Coded Plugins
  • Better servers!
  • Few points of Failure
  • Simple
  • Fewer environmental Snags

so...

Clients

  • They don't always know what is best
  • It's our job to help them the best we can
  • Sometimes that means taking control away.
  • Total control
  • Branded
  • Easy editing
  • In a month

and...

Lets Reinvent
the Wheel!

  • This is not so complicated
  • We could have total control

Or maybe not

  • It would be easy to get lost in the weeds
  • Distraction from original purpose
  • Time constraints
  • We could do a better job of leveraging what we already have

WordPress REST API

  • Continue using WordPress editing
  • Creates very portable data
  • Maintains archives and a more permanent database

Displaying Information

We've got the content from the WP REST API,

Now what?

A Static Site

  • We don't need fancy features
  • Reduces the server load
  • We can have a lightweight backend

What our Back end will do

  • Grab the content from the WordPress API
  • Create an HTML File by plugging the content into premade template.

Static Page

Servers

  • cPanel
  • AWS, Linode, Digital Ocean
  • AFS

 

Andrew File System

Interface

  • Minimal
  • Clear
  • Support our goal

Main Dashboard

Selecting the Post

Previewing the Post

Posted

A Story

It was a dark and stormy night...

All Done?

Wait but we need Multiple Alerts

New Dashboard

Front Page

Quick Pivot

Takeaways

  • Spend more time with Client in Discovery
  • Hard coded in fewer things
  • Look more at the bigger picture

 

Designing a High Availability Alert System

By milesdelliott

Designing a High Availability Alert System

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