Hello! We’ve recently finished the launch of our latest project, GuruFoo.com (http://www.gurufoo.com) and thought it would be helpful to the community if we discussed our architecture, technologies used, and lessons learned. GuruFoo.com (http://www.gurufoo.com) is an online community and social news site focused on sysadmins, developers, and other technology professionals.

Operating Platform

We’ve deployed on a VPS host (in our case, DigitalOcean (http://www.digitalocean.com)) running CentOS Linux 6.6. We keep our hosts pretty lean - in terms of what software is allowed to run on them - and have taken steps to harden them based on many of the best-practices and hardening guides. We do not use SELinux at the present time.

We make use of Wildfly 8.2 (http://www.wildfly.org) as our JavaEE 7 application server. Yes, our web application is JavaEE-based. While this may make some people cringe, that is mostly based on misinformation or obsolete points-of-view. JavaEE is no longer some heavyweight behemoth. Our memory footprint is small, and we have no problem with performance. More on this later… Our Wildfly servers are fronted with Apache HTTPD, and are configured to run in clustered mode using mod_cluster. We currently have 2 app server instances, but have tested a higher number using load testing scripts and have seen no problem scaling.

PostgreSQL 9.4 is our database of choice. We did look at MySQL and a couple of its derivatives, such as MariaDB. At the end of the day, however, we felt that PostgreSQL was the superior database. We haven’t regretted that decision once.

Part 2 will focus on our web application architecture and the technologies we used...