--- title: "Building OpenStatus: A Deep Dive into Our Infrastructure Architecture" url: "https://www.openstatus.dev/blog/openstatus-infra" date: "2024-12-29" author: "Thibault Le Ouay Ducasse" description: "A deep dive into OpenStatus' infrastructure architecture — how we use Vercel, Fly.io, Turso, and Tinybird to build a resilient synthetic monitoring platform." category: "engineering" image: "https://www.openstatus.dev/assets/posts/infra-openstatus/tech-infra.png" --- ## Infrastructure Overview OpenStatus is a synthetic monitoring platform designed with resilience, scalability, and efficiency in mind. Our users rely on us to provide real-time insights into their service health, making it essential to maintain a robust and performant infrastructure. In this post, we'll take a deep dive into our infrastructure architecture, exploring the key components, managed services, and design principles that power OpenStatus. ## Application Landscape Our platform consists of several interconnected applications, each designed for a specific purpose: 1. **Frontend Ecosystem**: - A NextJS application that powers our marketing site, user dashboard, and status page hosted on [Vercel](https://vercel.com/). - An Astro + Starlight-powered documentation application hosted on [Cloudflare Pages](https://pages.cloudflare.com/). We chose Vercel for the Next.js application because it performs exceptionally well there, the DX is great. And we selected Cloudflare Pages for the documentation since it is a static site and it's super cheap. 2. **Backend Infrastructure** All our backend services are hosted on Fly.io. - API server: Our public API and our alerting engine - Probes/Checker: a golang app deployed globally to monitor your service - Screenshot app: a service that takes screenshot of your website when we detect an downtime (Playwright) - Workflow engine: a server that handles the workflow of alerting, and our internal workflows (email automation). We chose Fly.io for our backend services because it's a great platform for deploying globally distributed services. It's also very easy to deploy and manage. We are planning to add more providers (e.g. Koyeb) to our probes to have a more resilient system. ![](/assets/posts/infra-openstatus/hosting.png) ## Managed Services We also rely heavily on managed services to avoid handling it ourselves. Here are the services we use: ### Scheduling Recognizing the critical nature of monitoring, we've heavily rely on CRON to ensure timely checks: - **Cron Jobs**: Currently using Vercel Cron, with plans to migrate to Google Cron for an enhanced user experience (better UI e.g. we can see when the cron ran, retry policy). ### Queue Architecture Due to the critical nature of checks, we are using a queue to handle task processing and retry logic: Every check is pushed to a queue and processed by our probes. If the probe fails to process the check, it is retried 3 times before being marked as failed. - **Job Queue**: Google Task Queues provide our distributed task management, with strategically segmented queues for different check frequencies We've implemented a granular queue system to ensure efficient task processing, each queue is dedicated to a specific check frequency (e.g. every minute, every 10 minutes). ![](/assets/posts/infra-openstatus/queue.png) ### Data Infrastructure We also don't want to handle the data infrastructure by ourselves. We rely on managed services for that: - **Primary Database**: [Turso](https://turso.tech?ref=openstatus.dev), providing a cost efficient data storage solution. We love the fact that's it's hosted SQLite database. It's just a file we can embedded in our services and sync it periodically. - **Analytics Database**: [Tinybird](https://www.tinybird.co?ref=openstatus.dev), enabling complex analytical queries and insights. ## Design Philosophy Our infrastructure design is driven by several key principles: - **Resilience**: Ensuring high availability and fault tolerance - **Scalability**: Architectural choices that allow seamless growth - **Cost-Efficiency**: Leveraging managed services and cloud credits - **Performance**: Optimizing each component for maximum efficiency. ## How much does it cost us? Our current monthly cost is around $328. This includes: - Vercel: $40, we are two members in the team, so we had to upgrade to the team plan. - Fly.io: $154 36*4 (all our probes at $4 average, not all regions cost the same) + $10 (for the api server) - Google Cloud Platform: $0 (We are still using the free credits, but we expect to pay around $50 for the queue) - Tinybird: $100 - Turso: $29 - Cloudfare: $5 # Conclusion Building a resilient synthetic monitoring platform is hard. It's not just a $5 VPS that you can deploy and forget. It requires a more complex infrastructure to be able to provide a reliable service. The drawback of this approach is the complexity of providing an easy self hostable services. Which is annoying because we are an open-source project and we want to provide a self-hostable version of OpenStatus. But we are working on community edition that will be easier to deploy. *Want to start monitoring your services with OpenStatus? [Sign up for free](/app/login?ref=blogpost-infra) and get started today!*