Infrastructure

Brief guide to Interactive News infrastructure

Static page publishing

Hosting

We use Amazon Web Services S3 to host static web pages. We have two buckets under an IT-maintained AWS account, a primary in us-east-1 and a mirror in us-west-2.

The primary bucket serves content through CloudFront and is reverse-proxied by an Akamai cache under http://www.politico.com/interactives/.

Publishing

We publish content to these buckets using our in-house interactives generator app. The app includes gulp tasks which handle publishing, cache invalidation and asset minimization and versioning.

Dynamic web apps

In-house apps

Our in-house Django applications tree is hosted by Heroku at https://datalab.politico.com. See the repo for more details.

Public-facing apps

Public-facing apps are temporary. Wherever possible, try to create static data resources from dynamic databases by pushing JSON to AWS S3, cf. White House Visitor Logs. If possible, use AWS Lambda to handle incoming data. If all else fails, use a library like django-bakery.

For temporary apps, we can provision Elastic Beanstalk and EC2 instances on our separate Interactives AWS account.

Databases

We maintain a production database in AWS on a separate Amazon account owned by the Interactives Team. It is an AWS RDS t2.medium instance running PostgreSQL 9.6 with automated backups going back 14 days. We do not have a hosted staging database at this time.