Why We Upgraded Our Stack Before the Alpha
Moving the site to a bigger machine before the alpha, and cleaning up on the way through.
With the Storm Buckets alpha close, I moved the whole site onto a bigger machine, about four times the headroom it had before. Same code, same site, more room under it.
I did it now because I did not want the alpha to be the first real test of our capacity. A small server runs fine right up to the point it runs out, and that point is rarely convenient. I would rather pick the day myself, while the site is quiet.
One box, the whole site
Until now the site ran on one small server doing everything: the app, the database, the cache, and the web layer in front of them. That is more than people assume a single machine can carry, and it carried it fine. The site was quick and nothing fell over. For a quiet site I would defend that setup. You can hold the whole thing in your head, and there are few places for a problem to hide.
The limit of a small box is that it gives no warning before it runs out. It reads healthy right up to the point it runs out, and an alpha is what pushes it there.
What an alpha does to a server
An alpha concentrates load. The traffic is heavier and it lands together, so the server holds more state at the same moment. A box that is fine with a steady trickle can behave differently under that, and the only way to learn how is to run it there. I would rather learn that on a planned afternoon than during the launch with people watching.
Bigger, and tidier on the way through
The main change is capacity, roughly four times the resources, where before there was none to spare. While the site was already in motion I also cleaned up. A migration is the cheapest time to fix the things that were only almost right, because you are touching all of it anyway. The containers run rootless now. TLS terminates at the host instead of further down the stack. The result is a smaller attack surface and fewer parts sitting in the wrong place.
I am not going to publish the exact specs. A precise resource profile is free reconnaissance for anyone probing the edges, and there is no reason to hand it over. Bigger than before, and put together properly.
Nothing you'll notice
Load the site today and it looks like it did last week. No banner, no maintenance window, no new button. The whole job was to swap what runs underneath without touching what people see.
That is most of infrastructure work. This migration was groundwork for the Storm Buckets alpha, which now has somewhere solid to land.
If you want in when it opens, get on the list.