Several infrastructure changes have been with my projects, admittedly too slowly but surely. The main recipient being Hobby Collection Django. I’ve detailed the history of its development on its project page and it currently stands in position to require some infrastructure changes. As a Python application it’s currently hosted on Heroku which has been especially useful/reliable given its purpose and requirements. What is admittedly cool to see with its growth over the years is that its data footprint has been approaching the limits of its hosting tier for some time. This has been accelerated by the recent growth of my audio collection as I’ve begun hosting/serving my own personal multimedia content including my personal music collection. This will eventually force me to upgrade to a higher capacity. In addition to this the hosting stack Hobby Collection Django runs on has been on a deprecation path since last year and needs to be migrated to a new stack. This is one of the projects which has regretfully fallen by the wayside that I’ve previously alluded to in my blog back in March.
Given the necessity to make infrastructure changes to Hobby Collection Django, I made a call earlier this year to migrate it off Heroku and onto a more intimately managed hosting stack. This is for two main reasons:
As was part of the original motivation for starting this project, I want to do this as a means of both applying existing skills I’ve acquired over years working with web services and infrastructure technology as well as learning new ones through experience
With Hobby Collection Django outgrowing its current hosting tier on Heroku its impending hosting requirements are estimated to cost a comparable amount to the alternatives I’m considering.
I’ve been chipping away at building a migration stack directly on AWS with an open mind towards Azure for the last couple of months. I’m also taking the opportunity to rebuild Hobby Collection Django itself on Django v3 (from v2) while also beginning to build the corresponding REST API as I talked about in my blog on “RESURRECTING A LONG-PLANNED PROJECT”. I currently have a working build of the project deployed and running on AWS and the experience as already proven to be gratifying, details of which I’ll share in a future blog.
There’s still much work to do. I’m truly rebuilding the application, looking for ways to improve yet simplify its code base as well as some of its backend data schema while I also perhaps re-theming the UX. I’m also looking to build out the REST API in parallel with the web app so that it’ll be immediately ready for iOS application integration. The deprecation of its current hosting stack will take effect on the beginning of November. At that point, the version of Hobby Collection Django currently deployed will get no further software updates. I may or may not take it down temporarily while I build out version 3 on its new hosting stack but more than likely I’ll leave it up and only migrate once there is at least a significant (even if incomplete) working state of the new version deployed on the new stack.
As I’ve said before, activity here has been down, but not out. This portfolio will grow.