5 A Cloud Guru: Architecture highlights, lessons learned

 

This chapter covers

  • A Cloud Guru’s original REST architecture
  • The reasons the team decided to migrate from REST to microservices and GraphQL
  • Lessons learned through the migration

In the first edition of this book, we described a serverless LMS (Learning Management System) built by A Cloud Guru (https://acloudguru.com). At that time, A Cloud Guru built a RESTful API backend using Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Google’s Firebase as its primary database. Since we published our first edition, A Cloud Guru has gone through a major transformation. The company moved from a RESTful monolithic design to a GraphQL-driven microservices architecture. This chapter describes this journey. We’ll look at the original RESTful design, the transition to microservices, how GraphQL plays a major part, and the lessons learned along the way.

5.1 The original architecture

5.1.1 The journey to 43 microservices

5.1.2 What is GraphQL

5.1.3 Moving to GraphQL

5.1.4 Service discovery

5.1.5 Security in the BFF world

5.2 Remnants of the legacy

Summary