ALTERNATE UNIVERSE DEV

CodePen Radio

#299: Meet CPHub

CPHub is just the name of an internal project (“CodePen Hub”) that we’ve released in the last couple of weeks. You (as a user) won’t notice a thing (except, perhaps, that some of our processors have been upgraded, like RubySass to DartSass). But for us, we notice, because not only does it do everything we hoped it would, it’s had side effects that have all been positive.

This show is Alex and Chris chatting about all the technical in-and-outs of the project. Short story: we have a new internally-facing relative URL, which is responsible for the vast majority of anything that would otherwise go out to a third-party URL. So for example, all our code processing services in the past would have been routed to an AWS Gateway and then to an AWS Lambda orchestrator and then to an individual AWS Lambda and back. Now they go to CPHub, to the individual Lambda, and back. But it’s not just AWS stuff, it’s really any third party HTTP request.

Among other things, CPHub is:

  1. Faster — a handful of Go-powered web servers that are literally faster, never break a sweat, and require less hops
  2. Less expensive — we have to manage those servers, but they are simple and cheap
  3. Are not subject to CORS concerns — because the HTTP requests are to our own domain

The thing I’m most excited about though is the consolidation. Every service we have is consolidated into the CPHub area of our repo and we’ve improved the deployment story for all of it.

Episode Timestamps

  • 01:14 Serverless functions on CodePen
  • 06:43 Advantages of CP Hub
  • 11:22 Sponsor: FeaturePeek
  • 14:17 Benefits of CP Hub continued
  • 19:16 Boom Boom
  • 25:02 Writing a node function
  • 32:15 A good idea all around
  • 34:36 Squashing bugs

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