Containerised e-commerce application

Third-year project of my BUT degree in Networks and Telecommunications, Cloud and Systems Development track: building an e-commerce platform for a fictional client company, RapidTrade Co., able to grow and to absorb activity peaks such as Christmas or Black Friday. The application has eleven microservices, which talk over REST or through NATS messages (an official NATS Docker image that the team configured rather than rebuilt). The web portal, authentication, payment and email sending were provided as containers. The rest had to be developed: I designed in Python all the required services, that is customers, product catalogue, cart, checkout and shipping, connected them together locally with Docker, and wrote their unit tests. The checkout service orchestrates it all: it fetches the cart and the customer, queries the catalogue to compute the total, requests the payment, then publishes the order on NATS so that the emails and the shipping follow, and empties the cart. Deployment on a three-node Kubernetes cluster, installed on OpenStack instances behind an OPNsense firewall, was handled by other members of the team, which worked in an agile way, in sprints, with a GitLab task board.