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Major Parts Tour via Install

Batteries Included’s platform has four significant architectural elements. Those are the Static, Control Server, Home Base, and CLI. Below we’ll walk through them in the same order a customer would first encounter them.

Static

This code generates the static HTML front site for Batteries Included. It’s got the landing pages, the internal documentation, the blog posts, any documentation we write, and the Hugo code needed to generate them.

The www website will be lots of people’s first landing place. It should be speedy loading and easy on the eyes. Lots of white space. Lots of brand recognition through small pops of color.

If we convince them that they want to register and spin up their first instance, it will link to the registration page on Home Base.

Home Base

Home Base is the web app attached to home.batteriesincl.com. It’s the place where customers can sign up for Batteries Included. All billing, reporting, onboarding new installations, centralized settings, and support are powered by code in this application.

It’s a Phoenix web app that heavily utilizes Live Views and WebSockets to emphasize the fun, fast, and accessible nature of Batteries Included.

Directories

  • home_base This directory contains the structs for everything the home base server stores in DBS and the code to retrieve, create and mutate them.
  • home_base_web This directory contains: The API that control-servers, CLI, and use The front UI for billing and billing user creation/auth/etc The front end for onboarding a new cluster installation (choose options -> copy pastable install instruction)
  • home_base_web/assets/ This directory contains the CSS and javascript of the home base. It also includes the tailwind CSS config.

Assuming the customer registers a new account, then configures their desired cluster install options, they get a copy past-able command that will download, install or upgrade and then run the bootstrap procedure via the CLI.

CLI

Directories

  • cli This is a small statically compiled rust project that producces the bcli command line application.
  • cli/src/tasks These are small composabile bits of functionality that do one thing during install or debugging.
  • cli/src/commands These implement the commands that are directly callable from the command line. Currently only dev.

Control Server

Control Server is a Phoenix web app and OTP app. It combines the desired state in the Postgres database, the current state in Kubernetes, the settings from the home base, and the recent history to automate all infrastructure running on a cluster.

We deploy it as a containerized Kubernetes ‘Deployment.‘

Directories

  • control_server is the set of struct definitions of everything held in the database. Including desired state, timelines, and a content addressable system for resources
  • control_server_web is the web UI for everything in the control server binary. It’s a status UI, an editing UI, and an opinionated portal to all the tools.
  • kube_services is the code that runs every OTP genserver interacting with Kubernetes. So watching state and putting it into ETS, or pushing a snapshot or desired state to Kubernetes.
  • common_core is the code that’s not dependent on ecto_sql or a running kubernetes cluster and might be used in Home or Control Server. Things like HTTP clients, Default configs, Ecto schemas,
  • common_core/resources is the code for templatizing the desired resource state in Kubernetes. So this contains the code that says current database settings have an image version at Foo, create a Pod with image Foo.

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