Architecture

Services

The platform is structured in a way that all the functionality is exposed via REST API's. The data from these API's drives the web interface which is a Single Page Application (SPA). There is a proxy that sits in front of the frontend SPA and backend API's. Additionally there is a message broker and asynchronous task / job queue that is used to run long-running and regular (i.e. hourly or daily) tasks.

Each of these services is either in the code and has an associated Docker file describing how it can be built and deployed on a docker friendly environment. Or this service uses a readily available Docker image that we configure for our own use.

The implementation details on each of these services are the following:

• Django API - This is the backend REST API service. Uses Django and Django REST Framework.

• Frontend - This is the SPA (single-page application) written in React.

• Nginx proxy - This sits in front of the Django and React services and routes requests. This helps us to not run these services on different ports, for example, that would cause CORS issues.

• Redis - in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker.

• Celery Workers - background distributed task queue, based on celery python package

• Celery Beat - background periodic tasks producer

• PostgreSQL - relational database