Infrastructure - FEUP-MEIC-DS-2025-26/madeinportugal.store GitHub Wiki

Cloud Infrastructure

[!WARNING] This page is still in progress. Expect breaking changes.

In this page, all the details about the event-driven micro-architecture deployed will be documented.

See the ToC below to find what you need:

Table of Contents

How to integrate?

See below a list of high-level actions needed to integrate your services to the production architecture. Depending on your needs, you may not need to have a microfrontend or a microservice.

Frontend

  • Make sure to have a microfrontend running in a Google Cloud project.
    See the example in the PoC for a starting point.

  • Make sure that in production, all of the API calls are made to the gateway URL (api.madeinportugal.store).

  • Add your microfrontend provider URL to the host and apply the components inside routes.
    See the repository MIPS-Frontend-Host-Module-Federation for more detailed instructions.

Middleware / Gateway connection

  • Make sure to have a microservice running in a Google Cloud project.
    See the Terraform template as a starting point on how to deploy a Docker image to the cloud.

  • Add your route to the Gateway's list.
    See the MIPS-Gateway-Routes repository for more detailed instructions.

  • Make sure your deployment of the microservice is only accessible via the gateway and that is not open to the internet. See the MIPS-Gateway repository for the service account and the settings to change in your Cloud Run instance.

Backend / Pub/Sub connection

Prerequisites

These requisites are only necessary until the final delivery; it is okay if they are not met for now.

  • All of the microservices cannot be in the same project, due to the limited credits a single account has;
  • All microservices should be isolated from the internet as much as possible (except the user-facing ones);
  • All microservices should know at the build step the domains of the components used to make communication between microservices possible;
  • Avoid single points of failure, which can make the whole product go down.

Overview

[!NOTE] See the C4 diagram for a more updated diagram.

  • When a user asks for a page from madeinportugal.store, the request goes to the "root" micro-frontend;
  • The "root" micro-frontend, depending on the page, is programmed to request components from other micro-frontends as needed;
  • When a micro-frontend needs data from its backend, a request is made to the gateway, specifying the request itself and which microservice should be contacted;
  • Each request to the gateway is responded to by the gateway with the content of the answer given by the microservice;
  • When a micro-frontend wants to do an action to a different microservice, it should request its backend via a REST API to ask for that action via the Google Pub/Sub; When that microservice is available, it sends the response to the Pub/Sub, which is later read by the backend;
  • Each microservice is also responsible for listening to subscribed messages and for sending state changes of their own context in a way that is useful for other microservices; the Google Pub/Sub is the intermediary of this event-driven communication.

Frontend: Micro-frontend

// TODO

Middleware: Gateway

// TODO

Backend: Pub/Sub

// TODO

Q&A

  • Q: The microservices need to have access to the singular Google Pub/Sub/Gateway/"root" micro-frontend while still being isolated from the network.
    Looks like a Google Pub/Sub instance can be configured to accept filtered IPs, but that needs to be explored further. Creating a virtual network between all the microservices can be another option.

  • Q: A micro-frontend needs to know a URI that it can use to make API requests.
    The gateway could also have a custom domain, like api.madeinportugal.store, for example.

  • Q: How can the gateway know to which microservice to send a message from the request received alone?
    There are many ways to do this. One way can be encoding in the path URL; for example all APIs about the product microservice can be in the URL api.madeinportugal.store/product.

  • Q: If a component used to make communication between microservices possible goes down, the whole service is impacted; how to avoid that?
    Those components could be replicated, for example.

  • Q: How can the backend tell the frontend that an operation involving other microservices was unsuccessful if all requests go through the Pub/Sub and are, therefore, asynchronous?
    The frontend can listen for requests from the backend with React Hooks, for example.

More resources

Feel free to message any of the authors with more questions, needs of clarification or suggestions! 👋

Special thanks to: