{"id":7803,"date":"2016-05-12T13:52:27","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T20:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/addons\/?p=7803"},"modified":"2016-06-24T14:24:55","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T21:24:55","slug":"amo-technical-architecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/addons\/2016\/05\/12\/amo-technical-architecture\/","title":{"rendered":"AMO technical architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

addons.mozilla.org<\/a> (AMO) has been around for more than 12 years, making it one of the oldest websites at Mozilla. It celebrated its 10th anniversary a couple of years ago, as Wil blogged about<\/a>.<\/p>\n

AMO started as a PHP site that grew and grew as new pieces of functionality were bolted on. In October 2009<\/a> the rewrite from PHP to Python began. New features were added, the site grew ever larger, and now a few cracks are starting to appear. These are merely the result of a site that has lots of features and functionality and has been around for a long time.<\/p>\n

The site architecture is currently something like below, but please note this simplifies the site and ignores the complexities of AWS, the CDN and other parts of the site.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Basically, all the code is one repository and the main application (a Django app) is responsible for generating everything\u2014from HTML, to emails, to APIs, and it all gets deployed at the same time. There\u2019s a few problems with this:<\/p>\n