CalendaPlus

CalendaPlus is a cloud-based calendar web application developed using the MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js) stack, making it a robust and efficient solution for managing events and schedules. It provides functionality for creating, editing, deleting, and listing events.

Table of Contents

1. Description
  - Frontend 
  - Backend 
  - Database 
2. Deployment
  - Breakdown
3. Accessing the Application

Description

Frontend

The client-side (frontend) of the application is located in the client branch of this repository. It has been developed using React, a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. The frontend provides a user-friendly interface for interacting with the calendar and managing events.

Backend

The server-side (backend) of the application is located in the server branch of this repository. It has been developed using Node.js, a JavaScript runtime, along with Express.js, a minimal and flexible web application framework. The backend handles various operations related to events, such as creating, updating, and deleting events, as well as retrieving event data from the database.

Database

CalendaPlus uses Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB as its database. Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service provided by Microsoft. It offers high scalability, low latency, and automatic indexing of data. The backend is connected to the database using a connection string, allowing seamless communication between the application and the database.

An image of the databse on the Azure portal

Deployment

The frontend and backend of CalendaPlus are deployed on a single Kubernetes cluster using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This cloud-native approach ensures high availability, scalability, and easy management of the application.

The infrastructure diagram

Breakdown

To deploy CalendaPlus, the following steps were performed:

Docker images were created for both the frontend and backend components of the application. These images contain all the necessary dependencies and configurations to run the respective services.
The Docker images were pushed to the Azure Container Registry. Azure Container Registry is a private container registry that allows storing and managing Docker container images.
A Kubernetes cluster was created using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). AKS provides a managed Kubernetes environment, simplifying the deployment and management of containerized applications. The cluster consists of a node pool, with 3 nodes.(Cluster Autoscaler was enable to utomatically scale the cluster to meet application demands)
Azure Kubernetes Service was authorized to pull images from the Azure Container Registry. This allows the Kubernetes cluster to access the required Docker images for running the frontend and backend services.
The deployment and service files, located in the manifests folder, were used to deploy the container images to the Kubernetes cluster. These files define the desired state of the application and provide instructions for creating and managing the necessary resources. An image of the running pods
To allow external services, such as web browsers, to access the backend service running on the Kubernetes pod (which has a ClusterIP service type), Nginx was used as a reverse proxy server. Nginx directs API calls from the frontend application to the IP address of the pod running the backend container.