WaterCrawl provides an out-of-the-box Docker Compose orchestration solution that encapsulates 12 components (PostgreSQL, Redis, MinIO, etc.) that would otherwise need to be manually configured into standardized services. The solution is designed using a microservice architecture, with containers communicating over an Overlay network and support for horizontally scaling Scrapy worker nodes to cope with traffic spikes.
The deployment process takes only three steps: cloning the repository → configuring .env → starting the compose file, saving 85% of initialization time compared to traditional deployment methods. Optimization suggestions for the production environment include: setting memory limits for Celery workers (2GB/instance is recommended), enabling WAL log archiving for PostgreSQL, and configuring MinIO's deletion-code storage policy.
The practice case of a cross-border e-commerce company shows that the deployment time of its crawler cluster was shortened from 3 man-days to 2 hours after using this solution, and the crawling throughput peaked at 120,000 pages/minute during the Black Friday period after utilizing the Kubernetes Operator to further realize automatic expansion and contraction. The system's built-in health check interface and Prometheus indicator export function provide complete monitoring support for containerized operation and maintenance.
This answer comes from the articleWaterCrawl: transforming web content into data usable for large modelsThe
