Powered by Terrastore

[bhauer]

I have launched a site with a back-end powered by Terrastore. Please
indulge my sharing...

For some time now, I've been working on a personal project on the
weekends. It's a locally-focused community activism web site intended
to give a voice to the normally silent majorities. As a personal
project, I was at liberty to dispose of the "safe" options for
building a web application and investigate fun alternatives.

For the data store, I selected Terrastore. To be clear: there's
nothing about this web site that required Terrastore; I could have
implemented this using any database or datastore. I selected
Terrastore because I wanted to experiment with building applications
on document stores and was immediately drawn to the clarity of the
Terrastore client APIs and its server-side extensibility.

My new site's name is Brian's Taskforce (ala Craigslist and any number
of other sites simply named for real people). I've launched within
the beach-cities region of Los Angeles, California. I hope to
gradually expand to the full Los Angeles area and then beyond,
assuming the idea has any traction. First, I need to work on the
local region and see if I can get any powers-that-be to pay attention
and prove or disprove the validity of the idea.

Some links:

About page
https://brianstaskforce.com/about

Home (list of communities in the LA beach cities area)
https://brianstaskforce.com/

El Segundo (a Los Angeles suburb), this community has most of the
initial tasks
https://elsegundo.brianstaskforce.com/

The blog
https://brianstaskforce.com/blog

The back-end configuration is two Terrastore instances and a master/
slave Terracotta configuration. I then have custom monitoring and
backup applications running to periodically evaluate the state of the
Terrastore and Terracotta instances to restore them if needed.
Overall, the back-end is significantly overpowered for this use-case,
but like I said, I had fun working with it.

My primary concern in running a production site on Terrastore was with
Terracotta since I have no prior experience administering Terracotta.
I don't know the best practices for administering and protecting the
persisted state of a Terracotta cluster. So I've gone to some fairly
extreme measures: I back up not only the Terracotta object database
but also custom Kryo-serialized and compressed extracts of the
document store.

I still remain somewhat hesitant about Terracotta, especially its node
start-up process that leaves so much to the administrator. Perhaps
that is a sign of flexibility, but it also means I had to roll my own
cluster start-up sequencer to ensure that after a cluster shutdown
(for OS patches, for example), the nodes start in the right order. It
makes me nervous to roll my own system management tools since that is
not my area of expertise.

All that said, it has been a lot of fun building a site on
Terrastore. The API is solid and Sergio Bossa has been extremely
responsive to any questions I've had along the way.

Thanks to Sergio and the rest of the team for the excellent work on
Terrastore. My application isn't a heavy-lifting application that
demonstrates a good use-case for Terrastore, but it is in
production. :) Best wishes to anyone else who is building on
Terrastore!

[Sergio Bossa]

Hi Brian,

thanks for your writeup and the kind words about Terrastore and its team.
We're happy it is working great for you, and do not hesitate to get
back with any other questions you may have along the way.
Best wishes for your project,
Cheers!

Sergio B.

--
Sergio Bossa
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiob