Full-stack web app to manage the Proofing for my photography hobby.
Proofing is the process in which a user chooses the photos they want edited and shipped by the photographer.
- Table of contents
- About the project
- Infrastructure Overview
- Used in this project
- Diagram
- License
- Contributors
I looked for quite some time for a web app that did what i needed (not much) the way i wanted but i could not find one (either they were expensive or they didn't have the features i was looking for), so i decided to do it myself, as an exercise to improve my skills and as a way to build a portfolio i can show when i get asked "what can you do?".
You will find no code as of right now in this repo (other than a small python script for the diagram), i will upload it as soon as everything is ready and tested.
Just a cool diagram that illustrates the complete infrastructure used in Photo Proofing.
We all know and love Cloudflare: powerful, easy to use and full of rich (and free) features.
Traefik is a new tool i'm learning, it's a Cloud-Native Networking Stack That Just Works... What does that mean? It acts as a reverse proxy, load balancer, certificate issuer (via Let's Encrypt) and generally as a way to keep microservices at bay (they're fun but a hell to manage). It can be used on most of your favourite cloud providers on on-premise, which is what i did, it runs in a Docker container.
Angular is my favourite frontend framework, i use it every day and i like the way the projects are organized so my choice for the frontend was pretty easy. React was the second choice, it would have been a great choice but i wanted to improve my Angular skills before switching to another framework (even though i had used it before).
.NET is my backend language of choice, it's fast, easy to use and has a great community. I used the .NET 6 framework (the latest LTS version). The API is fully asynchronous and easy to understand (i hope). I used the latest version of Entity Framework (code-first approach) together with LINQ to manage the Database i chose (Planetscale).
PlanetScale is a MYSQL-compatible serverless database platform (what a mouthful), it's built on Vitess which is a database clustering system that allows horizontal scaling of MYSQL (horizontal = more, vertical = more powerful), it has very cool features like:
- Branching, which allows for 100% online schema changes that are deployed as you would with a normal CI/CD pipeline.
- Horizontal Sharding: it's extremely scalable via the power of Vitess.
I also choose it beacuse it has a free tier, which is incredibile for the features it provides.
Why not throw a caching layer in there right? Redis is the most popular in-memory data store, you can find it in basically every cloud provider (AWS has Elasticache, Azure has Azure Cache for Redis and so on), i decided to host it myself, it lives in a Docker container and has persistence strategy, if the container ever goes down (which it will), you won't lose any data, pretty cool.
Redis is a Redis GUI provided by Redis, it has cool feature like real time monitoring of used memory and so on, a CLI and Redis modules, it's pretty cool. Guess what, it's hosted in a Docker container.
Cloudinary is the CDN i choose to use, mainly because it has a free tier which is more than enough for what i need. It also provides image resizing, ML features such as background removal, cropping ans so on. I only used it for the CDN part.
SendGrid is a cloud-based SMTP service provider which let you use their email server to send your emails, you get 100 emails a day on the free tier, more than enough for playing around. The paid tiers are also very honest in terms of pricing. I used it to send credentials, confirmations and so on to my users, pretty basic stuff.
Why the heck would I use SendGrid? Well in a cloud environment you usually cannot send email via STMP in a simple way, also who wants to manage an email server?
SendGrid offers an C# SDK to send emails with a few lines of code, I used more lines of code to setup the environment than to send the actual email.
Everyone needs a storage right? I chose Azure Blob Storage as that is what i'm familiar with.
Distributed under the GPL License. See LICENSE for more information.
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