Knowing the application

It is time to get to know the application that will be used throughout the book. This application will be the source of all explanations of concepts and all practical code that will be developed in the book. The base system is a news portal that consists of, basically, three areas:

• News: This is the news itself.
• Recommendations: These are responsible for storing user preferences and thus are able to offer specific news to users or even compose a completely unique home page according to the user profile.
• User: This is the basic registration information of a user.

All the application's business is on the same source code, that is, a monolithic software. The application was developed on the Django Framework, using PostgreSQL as a database, and Memcached as cache, which is only applied to the database layer.

With this structure, if there is an overload on the level of recommendations, all the applications must be scaled, and not only the part referring to the recommendations, because the application is monolithic. Another problem is that if one commits and incurs a problem, it propagates errors in segments that have no relationship with deficiency in the composition of domains. Something expensive for the application changes in the stack. If you want to change the type of cache used, then all other caches will be lost.