Hosting

The Maha Platform is hosted within the Amazon Cloud, leveraging a variety of network infrastructure technologies. All provisioning and configuration is automated using Red Hat Ansible to enable resources to be quickly removed, added, or replaced as needed.

Load Balancer

All inbound traffic from the public internet is balanced across a number of application servers using Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer service. This load balancer is highly available and fault tolerant allowing for large spikes in traffic and capable of distributing traffic between all available application servers.

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Static assets (uploaded files, images, JavaScript, and CSS) are cached and served from Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network. This ensures that all data files and client side source files are highly available to users and don’t unnecessarily burden the application servers for serving static files.

Application Server

The application servers are custom built nginx/nodejs application servers built on Amazon’s EC2 compute service. Each application server receives traffic from the load balancer, performs the the work of the Maha Platform, and sends a response back to the user through the load balancer.

Database Server

The database server runs PostgreSQL 12.2 and is built on Amazon’s EC2 compute service. The database server provide data to both the application servers and the worker to help them do work and fulfill requests.

Cache Server

The cache server runs Redis and is built using Amazon’s EC2 compute service. The cache server is able to save data for quick retrieval as well as pass messages and jobs back and forth between the application servers and workers.

Log Server

The log server runs GreyLog and is built using Amazon’s EC2 compute service. The log server receives logging output from every application server and worker and stores it in a database. It also serves a web interface that enables developers to monitoring performance and quickly track down errors in real time as they occur.

Storage Service

All uploaded file data is stored in Amazon’s cloud based storage service S3. These assets are stored securely, redundantly, and can only be accessed through the Maha interface and once successfully authenticated.

Worker

Workers perform time consuming, non user-interface related work for the application servers (e.g. sending a 10,000 recipient email campaign) They receive their jobs via messages passed through the cache server and notify both the application servers and the relevant users via secure web socket channels

Ansible Automation

All server configuration is automated through Ansible and enables developers to add additional replace servers as needed. Here are the Ansible configurations: