Python Django - Global API Deployment

Introduction

This tutorial will teach you how to deploy a Django based web-app serving PDFs on Seaplane. Following the steps below, you'll be able to deploy your API globally on multi-cloud and multi-region infrastructure in just a few minutes.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial you’ll need:

• A Django container — you can download our test container here to follow along.
• A working knowledge of Docker containers.
• A working Seaplane account — you can read more about account creation and set up here.
• The Seaplane CLI installed on your machine — you can read more about the Seaplane CLI here.

The Seaplane Managed Global Database is currently in a closed beta, so to make this tutorial accessible for everyone, we’ll be pulling the PDFs directly from the container. If you're interested in using our Managed Global Database, you can request early access here.

The API

For the purposes of this tutorial, we created a simple Django webserver that serves the Seaplane Global Compute One-pager PDF. It provides the user with an interface to request the PDF then serves the file directly from the container. The code can be found here.

Containerizing Your API

With our Django app in hand, let's create a container to deploy on Seaplane. A dockerfile is already prepared as part of the demo app. To build the image, run the Docker build command in the repo directory:

docker buildx build -t django-demo-app:latest .

caution

Working on an M1 Mac?

ARM-based images are not currently supported on Seaplane. If you are working on an ARM-based system like an M1 Mac, you need to build the image using X86 architecture by adding --platform linux/amd64.

Now that we have our Docker image, let’s do a quick test to make sure everything is in working order. Run it on your local machine using the command docker run -dp 80:80 django-demo-app . (this won't work on M1 Macs as they do not support X86 workloads).

Open the URL in your browser to view the result http://localhost:80/.

If everything was done correctly, you should see an interface with a single button. When you click that button, the app will serve the Seaplane one-pager.

Deploying on Seaplane

Time for the best part! Let’s deploy our newly created image using the Seaplane Managed Global Compute platform. By default, our platform deploys your application wherever your users are. If you have users in Tokyo, Paris, and San Diego your app will automatically deploy in Tokyo, Paris, and San Diego using the most performant combination of clouds, bare metal providers, and edge.

To deploy, you’ll need both the Seaplane CLI and an API key. Follow these steps to register your account and these steps to set up the CLI if you haven't done so already.

Next, you need to log in to the Seaplane Container Registry. First, create a file called seaplane-api-key.txt and copy in your API key. You can get your API key from the Flightdeck.

To log in run the following command in the directory where you saved your API-key.

cat seaplane-api-key.txt | docker login \
  -u docker \
  --password-stdin https://registry.cplane.cloud

For the rest of the steps, we will need the tenant-id and the tenant-subdomain through Flightdeck.

Logged in and with your tenant-id in hand you are ready to upload your container image. Run the following command and replace <YOUR-TENANT-ID> with the tenant-id.

$ docker tag \
  django-demo-app:latest \
  registry.cplane.cloud/<YOUR-TENANT-ID>/django-demo-app:latest

$ docker push \
  registry.cplane.cloud/<YOUR-TENANT-ID>/django-demo-app:latest

info

In Seaplane a flight is a logical container and a flight plan is a set of rules for our flight to adhere to. A formation can be thought of as your application or service. Formations are made up of flights.

Now we’re going to execute our first Seaplane compute command. First, we are going to create a local flight plan based on the image we just uploaded. To keep things simple you can leave all configurable details empty which will set them to their default values.

seaplane flight plan \
  --name django-demo-flight \
  --image registry.cplane.cloud/<YOUR-TENANT-ID>/django-demo-app:latest

To deploy our image we are going to add it to a formation and launch it globally.

Depending on your business rules and requirements we can add flags to allow or deny specific regions and providers.

• --providers-allowed and --providers-denied to include or exclude specific providers
• --region-allowed and --regions-denied to include or exclude specific regions

We'll keep things simple and leave these with their default values. This allows the workload to scale indefinitely and be deployed anywhere on any provider.

seaplane formation create \
  --name django-demo-formation \
  --include-flight-plan django-demo-flight \
  --launch

There are a few things happening now. We created a new formation, added our local flight plan to it with the -—include-flight-plan flag. Finally, we used the -—launch command to launch the formation. If everything is working as intended, you should receive the remote formation URL from the Seaplane CLI.

We can get a list of all running formations through the CLI by executing seaplane formation list. You can see our newly created formation listed as deployed (in air) i.e., running globally in this case.

$ seaplane formation list
LOCAL ID  NAME                       LOCAL  DEPLOYED (GROUNDED)   DEPLOYED (IN AIR)   TOTAL CONFIGURATIONS
96c84c57  django-demo-formation      1      0                    1                   1

Now that we've launched the application, we can see it by visiting the formation URL django-demo-flight.<tenant-subdomain>.on.cplane.cloud. The seaplane platform will take some time to distribute the configuration globally, so if you see errors such as:

upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection failure, transport failure reason: delayed connect error: 113

you may have to wait a bit longer for the system to propogate changes. And just like that, our app is live and serves PDFs to our users wherever in the world they may be.

Thank you for flying with Seaplane!