Journal Starter App

A FastAPI application deployed with modern cloud-native practices. This project demonstrates containerization, infrastructure as code, CI/CD automation, Kubernetes orchestration, and observability using Prometheus and Grafana.

🖼 Architecture Overview

flowchart LR
    subgraph User
        Client[Client / Browser]
    end

    subgraph Cloud[Kubernetes Cluster]
        App[FastAPI Application] --> DB[(PostgreSQL)]
        App --> Metrics[/Metrics Endpoint/]
        App --> Service[LoadBalancer Service]
    end

    subgraph CI/CD[GitHub Actions Pipeline]
        Source[GitHub Repo] --> Build[Docker Build & Push]
        Build --> Deploy[Tf + K8s Apply]
    end

    subgraph Monitoring[Observability Stack]
        Metrics --> Prometheus
        Prometheus --> Grafana
    end

    Service --> Client

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🚀 Setup & Deployment

1. Containerization

• The application is packaged with Docker.

• Image is stored in a container registry (DockerHub/ECR).

Build & push locally:

docker build -t droffilc1/journal-starter:latest .
docker push droffilc1/journal-starter:latest

2. Infrastructure as Code

• Terraform provisions:

  • Compute resources (ECS/Kubernetes nodes)

  • Networking (VPC, subnets, security groups)

  • PostgreSQL database

cd infra
terraform init
terraform apply -auto-approve

3. CI/CD Pipeline

• GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/) handles:

  • Build & test on every commit

  • Build & push Docker image

  • Deploy using Terraform & Kubernetes

4. Kubernetes Deployment

• Manifests under /k8s define:

  • Deployment (FastAPI app & PostgreSQL)

  • Service (LoadBalancer for app, ClusterIP for DB)

  • ConfigMap and Secret for configuration

Deploy:

kubectl apply -f k8s/

5. Monitoring & Observability

• FastAPI exposes /metrics endpoint.

• Prometheus scrapes metrics from the app.

• Grafana visualizes key metrics:

  • Request count

  • Error rate

  • Response latency

  • CPU & memory usage

---

📊 Grafana Dashboards

System Resources

Grafana JSON exports can be found in /grafana/provisioning/dashboards/.

---

📂 Repository Structure

.
├── app/                # FastAPI application
├── Dockerfile          # Container definition
├── infra/              # Terraform configs
├── k8s/                # Kubernetes manifests
├── .github/workflows/  # CI/CD pipeline configs
├── grafana/            # Grafana resources
├── prometheus/         # Prometheus resources
└── README.md

⚡ Quick Start

1. Run locally with Docker

docker build -t journal-starter . docker run -p 8080:8080 journal-starter

• Provision infrastructure

cd infra && terraform apply -auto-approve

• Deploy to Kubernetes

kubectl apply -f k8s/

• Access Monitoring

  • Prometheus → http://localhost:9090

  • Grafana → http://localhost:3000