Review Dashboard Architecture / Design

[scovetta]

The current dashboard was put together in a hurry, and might not be following the most modern practices. At a high level, the dashboard runs on a virtual machine (Linux) that has Docker installed. The dashboard consists of six containers (orchestrated by Docker Compose) -- these are Nginx, Web, Grafana, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Certbot.

The production environment is an overlay on top of the development environment.

Pain points:

1. I'm not sure how we'd scale this out to other hosts. I think this is what Kubernetes is all about, but my limited experience with it kept it out of the original design.
2. There is no automated deploy. I have to log into the VM, run a 'git pull', maybe rebuild the images, and restart them. It's painful and error-prone.
3. There would be advantages to externalizing PostgreSQL and Redis onto cloud infrastructure. For that matter, we should consider Grafana "in the cloud" as well.

We should have someone take a deeper look at this, come up with recommendations, and then implement them.