Services

Here we will go into more details of which services we are utilizing along the way to make all the this work.

Services

Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean is the backbone of infrastructure. This is were we host all of our servers, be it web- and worker-servers, along with databases (MySQL and Redis), load balancers, and DNS records.

Forge

Laravel Forge is a service that lets you provision and deploy unlimited PHP applications on DigitalOcean, Akamai, Vultr, Amazon, Hetzner and more. It is built specifically around the Laravel framework to ease the management of servers.

Envoyer

Laravel Envoyer is another service built around the Laravel framework to provide you with zero downtime PHP deployments.

Ansible

Ansible is another piece to the puzzle that focuses on server configuration, where as Terraform is meant to only provision your servers. So when Terraform has asked our cloud provider to create a new server we then have some Ansible scripts that configures the server, i.e. makes tweaks to increase PHP performance, install server monitoring tools like Datadog, etc.

Ansible Cloud

Link: ansible.stratasphere.cloud

These scripts are run along with the initial provisioning of the server, so in order to keep the already provisioned servers up-to-date when we make changes to those scripts, meaning that they should also receive those changes, we have a centralized tool from where we can run those scripts against our inventory of servers.

Workflow

Overview of the workflow