Turnkey production deployment

[patcon]

As stated pretty clearly in readme, this repo isn't turnkey.

This thread is to document anything related to making this code more production-ready :)

[patcon]

@metasoarous in Gitter:

Polis should handle hundreds of participants without breaking a sweat. Getting into the thousands you'll want to make sure you have enough provisioned capacity , both in terms of math worker size (RAM mostly), and number of server nodes handling requests.

[metasoarous]

To be clear, the repo itself is production ready (it's already in production in multiple instances around the world). We're even using the Docker infrastructure in production ourselves now. It's really just not the docker-compose infrastructure which is not currently safe for production as it stands. Certainly though, this all implies that deployment is not yet turnkey.

FWIW, I just wrote an extensive description of the current state of deployment infrastructure and roadmap in discussion #1319. As I see it, the work left is:

• Finish pulling out development artifacts into a separate docker-compose.dev.yml (see use base/prod/dev docker compose files #555)
• Do a full audit of the current contents of docker-compose.yml to make sure there's nothing there which shouldn't be (and probably do once over on the Dockerfiles to make sure they're in good shape)
• Ensure configuration is streamlined so that folks aren't tracking down multiple configuration files (see Draft: Feature/convict with config volume #1275)
• Improve deployment documentation
• Add load balancing to the docker compose setup

The last step here is necessary for scaling server nodes in order to support larger (and multiple simultaneous) conversations, but is also potentially a lot of work, and so could be split off as a separate issue. I think it's fine to consider this issue as being focused solely on making it relatively easy to set up a secure small deployment using the docker-compose infrastructure. But worth including above for the sake of tracking the broader roadmap.

Thanks