Architecture Design

This page provides a high-level overview of the project architecture.

Overview

The project repo is a mono-repo split up between directories for the /frontend, /backend, /traefik, and /docs. Each directory contains its own microservice(s). The /traefik directory is intended for deployment in a production environment.

Why a mono-repo?

• Only client for the MetaGrid API back-end is the MetaGrid front-end
• Simplifies end-to-end development and testing -- ship code faster!
• Effective end-to-end code reviews
• Easy refactoring
• Reduced code complexity with standardizations across services

Source: http://blog.shippable.com/our-journey-to-microservices-and-a-mono-repository

Simple Architecture Diagram

File Structure

In root, there are multiple directories that contain microservices:

• /frontend
• /backend
• /traefik
• /docs

Front-end

The user interface is rendered through React components which allow for modular and reusable design patterns.

To communicate with REST APIs, the front-end uses a promise-based HTTP client. Aside from the MetaGrid API back-end, here are other ESGF services used:

• ESGF Search API - This API is the interface connected to the search engine (Solr, Elastic Search)
• ESGF wget API - This API generates wget scripts for downloading datasets

Back-end

MetaGrid's Django REST Framework back-end serves REST APIs, which send and receive JSON data via endpoints.

Traefik

Traefik is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik is used in the production deployment of MetaGrid.

Docs

Stores document related files for the entire project using Markdown and MkDocs.