A basic recipe app built to explore microservices in Node.js

Frontend

• The frontend is built using React and does not consist any fancy stuff.

• The frontend has a dashboard displaying all recipes in card form and a user can add their recipe as well as upload a photo of it using the Add button.

• On clicking a recipe card it displays the ingredients, time taken to prepare the recipe, steps of the recipe.

• Users can add comments to the recipe page by using the add comments form.

Dashboard

Add Recipe

Recipe Page

Comments Section

Backend

• There are 3 microservices built using Express (Typescript)

  • Recipes microservice
  • Image Upload microservice
  • Comments microservice

• Recipes microservice contains the routes related to recipes. (All CRUD features)

• Image upload microservice works only to upload images to third party asset hosting service (Cloudinary).

• Comments microservice works only to add comments to specific recipes.

• Each service is containerized using Docker and then orchestrated using Docker Compose.

• HAProxy works as an API gateway and a load balancer that balances multiple instances of each service.

Below is the architecture.

• I did not use any message queue but RabbitMQ can be added to queue the requests.

Load testing using JMeter

• I have used JMeter to load test the server with multiple GET requests.
• /recipe route is tested.
• Below are the results for multiple loads and changes made to handle the load.

3 servers

• 1000 requests to API gateway. 3 servers load balanced (Round-Robin) by HAProxy that serve this route.
• In this true signifies successful requests with 200 response and false signifies 503 Service Unavailable response.

4 servers

• 1000 requests to API Gateway.
• 4 servers can handle all 1000 requests successfully.

• 2000 requests to API Gateway.

• 5000 requests to API Gateway.