Introduction

As our tech company has grown over the years, we have encountered a tremendous challenge in maintaining the compatibility of our tech stack. With multiple teams working on different projects, we encountered several compatibility issues that have impacted our delivery timelines and increased the cost of production.

After thorough research, we have successfully come up with a technical solution that will address all our compatibility concerns. In this post, we will discuss the details of our solution and how we plan to implement it across all our teams.

Technical Solution

Our technical solution is a complex system that involves multiple frameworks, API integrations, and a cloud-based database. With this solution, we aim to ensure that all our software components are compatible with each other. Our solution comprises five critical components, as shown in the flow diagram below.

flowchart TD; A[API Gateway]-->B(NATS Streaming); B-->C(FaaS); C-->D(Microservices); D-->F(Pub/Sub);

Component 1: API Gateway

Our API Gateway provides a layer of abstraction between our microservices and the external world. We have integrated the Amazon API Gateway to handle all our HTTP requests and perform all load-balancing tasks. Our API Gateway also caches requests that hit our endpoints, hence reducing the response time of our systems.

Component 2: NATS Streaming

Next, we integrated our API Gateway with the NATS Streaming system, which provides a highly scalable and reliable messaging system. NATS Streaming system ensures that all our messages are delivered in the correct order, ensuring data consistency across all our systems.

Component 3: Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)

Our FaaS component comprises Lambda functions running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. We developed multiple Lambda functions that handle different microservices, such as user authentication, database access, and notification services. These Lambdas can be invoked from any of our microservices, eliminating the need to maintain multiple instances of the same functions.

Component 4: Microservices

Our microservices architecture comprises multiple Node.js services that handle different parts of our application workflow. The microservices interact with each other using the NATS Streaming system, ensuring that all messages and workflows are correctly order and regularized.

Component 5: Pub/Sub

Finally, we have integrated our microservices with the Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) pattern, which provides a scalable and fault-tolerant messaging system. Our Pub/Sub system ensures that all messages are delivered once and only once, hence reducing the risk of message duplication.

Conclusion

Our solution is complex and requires a significant investment in infrastructure and maintenance; however, it provides us with the ability to maintain compatibility across our tech stack effortlessly. Our teams can now work in parallel, deploying new services with minimal impact on already deployed services.

In conclusion, we believe that our solution represents a significant leap forward in solving compatibility issues, and we are excited to implement it across all our teams.