Shortame

In case you're wondering, shortame stands for: YeS, sHORtame is a Terrible nAME.

Index:

1. Overview
   1. Infrastructure
2. Installation
3. Observations

Overview

Shortame is URL shortener composed by 2 services: a FastAPI App and key generator service. Both of them will be described shortly as follows:

• Key Generator (key_generator.py):
  • Responsible for generating new keys (used as the path of the short URLs).
  • Keys are 7 char-long strings in base62.
  • Keys are stored on a Redis list, which has a minimum size.
  • This process runs constantly checking if the list size is less than the minimum size.
  • If positive: the service generates a new key, and adds it to the Redis list (if the key is not already present in the DynamoDB database).
• App (shortame/app.py):
  • The API where users may interact with shortame.
  • It uses the keys created by the Key Generator service as the short URL.
  • There are 2 routes in the service:
    • POST: /url - users send a long URL in the body and receives a short version of it.
    • GET: / - a redirect route, which will send users to the original long URL.
  • On redirect, shortame will first check if the url is present on cache. If not, then it will search for it in the DynamoDB database.

Infrastructure

• DynamoDB:
  • Where all of the pairs short:long URLs are persisted.
• Redis:
  • Caching for the redirecting (GET) part of the FastAPI app.
  • Contains a list of short paths (keys) to be used in the /url part of the FastAPI app.

Installation

The easiest way to get shortame up and running is using Docker Compose.

In the root directory, execute:

$ docker-compose build

And then:

$ docker-compose up

The project should be available at http://127.0.0.1:5000/docs

Observations

• Why 7 characters, and not 8 or 6?
• Why DynamoDB and not a relational database?