PetBattle – the Backstory

Pictures of domestic cats are some of the most widely viewed content on the internet1. Is this true? Who knows! Maybe it's true. What we do know is that they make a great backstory for the example application we use in this book to help explain a number of DevOps practices:

Figure 3.1: PetBattle — The backstory

PetBattle is a hobbyist app, started for fun, hacked around with so that the authors can Cat versus Cat battle each other in a simple online forum. A My cat is better than your cat type of thing. There are very few bells and whistles to the initial architecture — there is a simple web-based user interface and an API layer coupled with a NoSQL database.

PetBattle begins life deployed on a single virtual machine. It's online but not attracting a lot of visitors. It's mainly frequented by the authors' friends and family.

While on holiday in an exotic paradise, one of the authors happensed...