Novagram — Real-Time Chat Application

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Architecture
• Tech Stack
• Infrastructure Setup
• CI/CD Pipeline
• Key Challenges & Solutions
• Local Development
• Deployment Guide
• Lessons Learned

Novagram is a real-time web chat application designed for devops end to end practice, deployed on AWS ECS Fargate with CI/CD automation and infrastructure-as-code via Terraform.

Tech stack

Frontend: React single-page app served by Nginx

Backend: Node.js + Socket.IO(web-socket)

Database: MongoDB Atlas (managed DB)

container image - docker image

Containerization: docker

Orchestration: AWS ECS Fargate

Networking: one VPC + ALB (path-based routing)

CI/CD: GitHub Actions using OIDC(open id connect)

Security: IAM roles, Secrets Manager

Image security: Trivy scanning

Infrastructure management: Terraform

summary of the devops work done on this project

Step 1—Architectural Planning

This step involved understanding the make of the project

• Backend and frontend

  What runs and starts the app ?

  - The backend was built with Node.js and socket.io(for realtime communication)
  - The backent starts with Node app.js 
  - The frontend was built with react 
  - The frontend starts with npm run
  

  What database is used and how does it connect

    - The backend used mongoDB Atlas which is a self-managed database by mongodb
    - its connect to the mongodb via url which is injected via environment
  

  Via what port does the backend and frontend connect to

      - The backend uses port 5000
      - the frontend uses port 80
  

  What environments exist and what separate each environment?

      - for both backend and frontend uses 3 environment which are development, staging and production environment
      - each environment connects to different mongo database
  

  What is the end point for the backend to know its healthy

     -  for the backend the end point is /health at port 5000
     -  for the frontend the end point is / at port 80
  

Step 2— Containerization

Though the application could run on my pc after installing all packages and dependencies

summary of version 1

backend

• user can create account
• user can join rooms
• Admin can reset user pin, delete user create new rooms
• online and typing indication

frontend

• user inteface is very basic (white background)
• online and typing indicators are visible