I developed an interest in microservices and distributed systems, and believed building a social media backend api may be a good start.
- ASP.NET Core (C#)
- Docker used for containerization
- Kubernetes used for orchestration
- Github actions used for building each Docker container and deploying it to Docker Hub
- Nginx Ingress Controller for loadbalancing. Allows for traffic to be directed to appropriate services and ingress level authentication.
- RabbitMQ, using the direct Publisher/Consumer model. Each service/need will have its own queue.
- Will explore GRPC in the future
- Microsoft SQL Server for keeping track of users, posts
- Neo4j Graph Database for keeping track of connections amongst users
- Redis for caching follower/following lists, posts, home feeds and user feeds
- Authentication Service
- Handles logins, registration and authentication
- Passwords are hashed using Bcrypt and JWT is utilized to authenticate the user
- Email Service
- Consumes bus and email sent out on registration for user awareness
- MailTrap is used for development email testing
- Personal Network Service
- Handles the follower and following interactions between users
- Consumes message bus and a user node is created in the graph on regisration
- Post Service
- Handles users creating posts
- Feed Service
- Generates the user and home feeds
- Consumes message bus and on every post, it is pushed to all follower's feeds
- Consumes message bus and on every follow/unfollow, the list is stored in the cache and is rebuilt to reflect the change
- Redis
- Failover
- Timed expiration of cache (Remove frome cache if user has not logged in for eg. 30 days)
- OAuth
- Kafka
- GRPC to fetch followers and posts when not in cache
- Cassandra Database
- Vault/Secret Management
- Distributed Logging (eg. Elastic)