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Shorten My Link

Shorten My Link is an API to shortern URLs.

Example usage

Make a POST request to https://shorten-my-link.herokuapp.com/shorten_url with the request body:

{
  "url": "https://really-really-really-long-unwieldy-url.com"
}

The response will be:

{
  "shortened_url": "https://shorten-my-link.herokuapp.com/<short_id>"
}

where <short_id> is a random alphanumeric string. Navigate to https://shorten-my-link.herokuapp.com/<short_id> in your browser and you will be re-directed to https://really-really-really-long-unwieldy-url.com.

Scalability

This API is currently written as a Python Django application, hosted on Heroku's free plan. Data is stored in PostgreSQL running on a separate server (also hosted on Heroku). There are multiple ways of scaling the API to production scale. These are, in increasing levels of scalability:

  1. Increase the server size and utilise ulti-threading.
  2. Deploy the application to multiple servers behind a load balancer (e.g. Amazon EC2 + Elastic Load Balancer).
  3. Elastically scale the number of servers to meet increasing demand.
  4. Add additional database replications on additional servers and balance load between them. For PostgreSQL, Slony and pgpool are useful tools for replication and connection pooling, respectively.
  5. Deploy multiple servers behind multiple load balancers.
  6. Use Memcached for caching recently created short urls.

An entirely different approach to scaling is to write the API as a set of functions to run as part of a serverless architecture, for example using AWS Lambda.

To Do

  • Add more throrough logging and monitoring.
  • Add more comprehensive error handling - the API is not handling some edge cases correctly at the moment.
  • Add separate deployment configurations for production and developement environments.