mtigas

You really can’t beat a system that uses templates.

I'd tried my own Javascript-based content system in the past (where everything is based on one HTML page and JS loads the page content), but those add a bit more client-side complexity (not to mention search engine reachability).

For more dynamic file storage (say, using FileField or ImageField in a model), I believe django-storages would work, too. (Make sure you configure django-storages with the DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE option set to S3 also.)

Assuming you’re managing your site via a local dev server (or a server that "hosts" the "hot type" version of the site), any time you "upload" a file to your local server, it'll actually upload to S3 (and any calls to "field.url" will actually map to the S3 URL). Not sure how well it'll work in all use cases: I haven't actually used FileField or ImageField myself in the django-medusa+django-storages usecase, but I have used both separately so I’m fairly sure this is possible.

This is a pretty darn good question though, so I’ll likely make a follow-up blogpost with a more comprehensive walkthrough regarding handling staticfiles and FileField/ImageField. Sometime in the near future.

Multiple sites/subdomains is a bit more complicated. I’d say you should probably use separate Django instances for each and render them separately. (For S3, you’d need to use separate buckets, anyway.) If they need to share data, you can configure multiple Django settings.py configurations for each site but still use the same source tree and local database. (See the Django sites framework: [3])

What if you don’t want to use your own infrastructure? (See Ars Technica’s WWDC liveblog[1], which polls JSON files that are in the same directory and appeared to be periodically updated during the event, by some software that a reporter was using. Ostensibly because the feature is short-lived, super-high-traffic — likely thousands of concurrent users — and should be as low latency as possible due to the nature of the event.)

Not to knock on Varnish, because I use it on plenty of larger things and love it. I just think that there are usecases where you can rationalize not even having an application server to cache in front of.

In most applications I work on, I lovingly use and abuse Memcached, Redis, and Varnish. If you’re working on an application that warrants using a live website and the whole application server shebang, then yes, I’d agree with you.

But for something like my blog and other non-dynamic websites which don’t update very much at all, I’m not sure if I see a pressing need for an application server. My blog previously ran varnish-nginx-uwsgi-django, but I was moving off of a VPS and it was the last thing left on that server. I got curious.

In the case of something like the L.A. Times’ Data Desk[2] projects (who use their own django-bakery app), if some views are very expensive/slow to generate, you can offload the work from the application server and do it in advance. (This makes sense if you want to just render everything out on a fast workstation or if you have a local database of several hundred gigabytes that you don’t want a live server querying to crunch the data.) It’s not out of the question to pregenerate HTML pages, JSON for visualizations, and simple image files (generated in PIL).

In any case: it’s not so much a question of “high traffic apps” as much as the tradeoff between (computation cost + server maintenance cost) and (app that is server-side dynamic or updates frequently). Most people don’t want to configure and maintain an app server (with cache layers and all) for a simple app and those that don’t seem to have uptime issues the moment they get any legitimate traffic: see [3].

So:

* I decided I didn’t want to maintain an app server for my blog, and my historical average for updates is about once every four weeks (or even more infrequent). * People seemed to be big fans of Jekyll/Hyde, Movable Type’s static publishing mode[4], WP Super Cache, etc. * I felt a Django-friendly analogue to those would be cool. * Like any developer tinkering with their own blog, there didn’t have to be a point.