Infrastructure

This page documents the backend infrastructure and the CI/CD pipeline used to build, test, and deploy services. The full CI/CD flow is executed by Jenkins and deploys container images to AWS ECR/ECS with a pre-production promotion step and notifications to Slack and Monday.

Architecture overview

Below is a simplified architecture diagram showing the major infrastructure components and how they interact.

CI/CD pipeline (Jenkins)

This pipeline is executed by Jenkins on GitHub push events. It performs static checks, unit tests, build, integration tests, pushes images to ECR, and deploys to pre-production ECS. After QA, a manual promotion step deploys the image to production and sends notifications.

Jenkins pipeline details (recommended)

• Use a Jenkinsfile in repo (Declarative Pipeline).
• Use ephemeral, autoscaling Jenkins agents (Kubernetes or cloud agents) to run builds and tests.
• Secure credentials with Jenkins Credentials Store: AWS credentials (ECR push), DockerHub if used, Sentry/API keys, Slack/Monday webhooks.
• Steps:
  1. Checkout code (shallow clone).
  2. Install dependencies (pin package manager: pnpm install).
  3. Lint + Prettier check, TypeScript typecheck.
  4. Run unit tests (fast path); fail early on failures.
  5. Build artifacts (production bundles).
  6. Start docker-compose integration environment (docker-compose -f docker-compose.integration.yml up --build) and run integration tests.
  7. Build Docker image and tag with sha and branch (e.g., repo:sha-<short>).
  8. Authenticate to ECR and push image.
  9. Trigger pre-production deploy (ECS service update or CI/CD deployment job).
  10. Wait for smoke tests / run automated acceptance tests against pre-prod.
  11. Pause for manual QA approval (Jenkins input step). On approval, deploy to production.
  12. On success or failure send notifications to Slack and create/update an item in Monday via webhook.

Integration tests and docker-compose

• Keep a small, reproducible docker-compose.integration.yml for services needed by integration tests (local Mongo, Redis, Kafka or lightweight test doubles).
• Run integration tests in an isolated network and tear down on completion. Use --exit-code-from to surface test failures to Jenkins.

ECR / ECS deployment strategy

• Push immutable images to ECR with tags: sha-<commit>, branch-<name>, and optionally nightly-<date>.
• Use ECS services (Fargate recommended) behind an ALB. Use blue/green or rolling deployments (via CodeDeploy or ECS deployments) for zero-downtime.
• Pre-production environment is an identical ECS cluster/namespace using the pushed image tag. Use task definitions that reference image by tag.
• Keep a short retention for images but ensure ability to rollback by re-deploying older tags.

Observability & Alerts

• CloudWatch for metrics and alerting (CPU, memory, request latency, custom app metrics like send-rate).
• Sentry for error aggregation and stack traces.
• Centralized logs (CloudWatch Logs / ELK / Datadog) for troubleshooting.
• Alerts wired to Slack and PagerDuty when thresholds are crossed.

Security & IAM

• Use least-privilege IAM roles for Jenkins agents and ECS tasks.
• Store secrets in AWS Secrets Manager or Parameter Store; Jenkins pulls securely at runtime.
• ECR push permissions limited to CI principal; production deploy role limited to deploy-only.

Notifications & Integrations

• Slack: pipeline start, failures, successful production deploy, and alerting.
• Monday: create or update board items for releases and QA status via webhook after pre-prod deployment and after production promotion.

Operational notes

• Keep the Jenkinsfile small and delegate complex scripts to a scripts/ci/ folder in the repo.
• Keep integration test environment minimal to ensure CI runs fast.
• Use feature flags for risky releases to reduce blast radius.

If you want, I can:

• Add a ready-to-use Jenkinsfile (declarative) tailored to this repository.
• Create a sample docker-compose.integration.yml for the integration step.
• Add the Slack and Monday webhook snippets to the pipeline.