Third Iron

Thanks to some assistance from FastRobot, we got a great Terraform + Chef deployment mechanism that replaced our previous reliance on Amazon OpsWorks after they decided to stop maintaining that service. Having the configuration checked into source control is more powerful than having it all in the GUI with AWS OpsWorks, and we can see the changes as regular pull requests just like our application code.

The simple add-ons system allows us to add a variety of data stores, data analysis tools, log archiving, and other features in a very simple, Lego block-style way. And they've kept our web hosting and Postgres servers going for years with minimal input from us, which is just what we want.

We build our customer-facing web apps primarily in EmberJS, but we wanted to get some experience with React for a few reasons. The biggest reason is because of its popularity, and we wanted to make sure we had some working knowledge of it.

We ended up using React in our web browser extension project, and it has worked out pretty well overall.

We recently rediscovered Amazon SQS and are using it for two upcoming systems. Back in 2012 and 2013 we wanted to use it, since it eliminated the need to host RabbitMQ ourselves. However, SQS didn't support FIFO queues at the time. They eventually added it in 2016, but we had been using RabbitMQ for years, and we hadn't noticed this new development in a tool we didn't use.
But we recently had a little trouble setting up RabbitMQ with Terraform, and we discovered SQS is easily supported with Terraform, and has all the features we once wanted.