samdzie / 497s-project-phase-4-final

Final submission for Team Vision's CS 497S project

Team Vision: Project Phase 4 Final

Overview

Our project is a web application for organizing communities. Our vision is to combine the features of a home webpage with those of a shared online calendar. The goal is to allow groups of people - whether they be friend groups, clubs, or organizations - to have an easy-to-use tool for organizing events.

This project was developed for CS 497S: Scalable Web Systems, taught by Professor Tim Richards at UMass Amherst in Fall 2020.

Team Members

• Hichem Bennia
• Sam Dziewietin
• Achintya Kumar
• Angela Nayiga
• Zenry Padua

System Design

The system is divided into four microservices:

• Web UI: A web app for displaying a group's homepage and calendar.
• Homepages: Manages information displayed on a group's homepage (e.g group name, welcome message).
• Events: Manages the events displayed on each group's calendar.
• Images: Manages images used by the system, especially group icons.

The Web UI service consists of a frontend and a backend, while the other services consist of a database and RESTful API. The Web UI frontend requests data from the backend, which in turn makes API calls over HTTP to the other services to obtain the necessary data.

Each service is built into a Docker image (or several with docker-compose). These images are then deployed to AWS Elastic Beanstalk (EB).

Scalability

Most of our scalability considerations are taken from recommendations given in Sam Newman's Building Microservices.

Our first major step towards addressing scalability concerns is by establishing service boundaries such that each team member develops, tests, and deploys their own microservice. This allows each team member to select the technology that best fits their needs and also allows each service to be scaled independently of the others (e.g. by deploying more instances).

Our method of deployment is to build Docker images and deploy them on Elastic Beanstalk. This approach significantly reduces the time and effort required for deployment and allows us to rapidly expand the number of server instances, if necessary.

As demonstrated in the Web UI service, we are developing the ability to employ continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to significantly speed up the development and release processes. GitHub Actions allows us to run a CI workflow on each push, using pytest to run unit and service tests. GitHub Actions also permits us to automatically deploy our services to Elastic Beanstalk when a new release is created.

Repositories

• Web UI (Sam Dziewietin)
• Homepages (Hichem Bennia)
• Events (Zenry Padua)
• Images (Angela Nayiga)
• Voice Assistant (Achintya Kumar)

Demo Videos

• Web UI
• Homepages
• Events
• Images
• Voice Assistant
• Entire System

Monitoring

A system monitoring service can be accessed here.