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