⚡️Tools and products we use at Spike - part 1
Kaushik Thirthappa
Posted on May 11, 2020
Every organisation uses a multitude of a number of tools to support their business. We will try and cover all of the ones we use at Spike
This post has all the DevTools or say products used by engineering.
Second part on all the marketing, support products we use 👉
PS: not covering our tech stack here
Servers
1. AWS
This is pretty clear. AWS is reliable and has over 160+ products 😳. From deployments, hosting, storage and monitoring. All of it on AWS.
2. Vercel (formerly Zeit.co)
We use this for all of our serverless needs. Why didn't we directly use AWS lambda instead? Well, only because the setup on Vercel is so damn easy. Highly recommend them.
3. MongoDB Atlas
For all our DB hosting needs. We haven't moved all of it yet but soon we will finish this migration.
Monitoring
1. Cloudwatch
We monitor a bunch of things from network I/O, CPU, Disk space, Autoscaling, etc.
2. Healthchecks.io
We have a few cron jobs running at different schedules. While setting cron in Linux is easy, we still monitor it via Healthchecks to make sure it is actually running successfully. You can set your cron expression and they will make sure they are getting a ping ensuring it's all good. Super awesome tool.
3. Uptime Robot
Uptime monitoring to make sure all of our endpoints are up and running. Some endpoints everyone should monitor 👉
- Website
- Dashboard
- DB endpoint
- Cache endpoint
Good alternative is Apex Ping
4. Datadog
For our Application Performance Monitoring. When incidents happen, we want to make sure that alerts reach to you within one second. Datadog helps give us great insights on how our application peaks at certain times.
Why Datadog and not New Relic?
5. Nginx Amplify
To monitor our web server. Nginx is clean, easy to setup and has a lot of plugins you can use.
6. Sentry
For all our error monitoring. They provide a ton of features and we have hardly ever been disappointed. Integrates with most languages and frameworks, catches all exceptions on serverless too 👏
tip: send additional data and use tags to identify your errors better with Sentry
CI/CD
1. Buddy.works
We rely the most on Buddy for one simple reason - the UI.
You don't have to spend a lot of time configuring on Buddy or even writing YAML files to get it running. This is easily the most underrated tool we use.
2. Travis CI
This is in our wishlist. We have been writing a lot of test cases in the past couple of months and in the near time we will be integrating Travis. shoutout to Kent 👉 for building testingjavascript.com
DevTools
1. Ngrok
Clean, succinct and does the job well to expose our localhost urls so we can build integrations we ease. We have reserved about 4 subdomains on ngrok so we don't have to spend time on reconfiguring the webhook urls for dev environment.
2. VS Code Live Share
Great for remote teams, we usually have a Google Meet call and pair program many-a-times using VS Code Live Share.
3. Twilio
Easy to integrate with extensive documentation that you will actually read. Easily a very reliable platform for us to alert customers via Phone and SMS.
4. Sendgrid
We send all email notifications using Sendgrid. Reliable, easy to use SDK and so far not that expensive.
Non-developer tools are next in this short series.
Posted on May 11, 2020
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