Starting a new adventure
I have recently moved my last project RentAssured.ie into maintenance, so it’s time to start a new project. Unlike RentAssured this will be a personal project, that I’m looking to turn into a business. For that reason I not going to go into too many details about the business idea but instead I’m going to focus on the technical details.
The project will use a micro-service architecture using Docker for containerisation. I’m using micro-services because there will be a lot of different loosely associated services that need to be separate from each other but share certain services, such as authorisation. Using micro-services will allow me to keep the different code bases separate and avoid changes affecting other areas. Another freedom micro-services will give me is to experiment with different technologies for different services rather than being tied to one tech stack, any thing that doesn’t work can be thrown away. I’m particularly like the idea of having the UI completely separate from the service layer, it will allow front ends to be easily swapped in and hopefully keep the site looking fresh. Another benefit will be the development of any mobile apps that the project needs. They will be able to easily connect to the micro-services and communicate with the main system, giving the apps the same functionality as the main site.
Hosting will be cloud based and take advantage of containers for deployment. The advantages of cloud are well documented in my specific case what I want is the low cost (free) investment in hardware and the ability to scale out. The nature of the project will involve certain services that will have low use at certain times but could potentially be under high load for short periods of time. But the real reason is that I can’t write code and look after infrastructure at the same time, so cloud and infrastructure as a service is the only option for me.
Over the next few months I will be writing about some of the technical challenges and the design of the upcoming project.