Review Architecture Decision and Communication Process

Arch decisions and review

• Quick readout of update on Architecture Decision and Communication Process
• A cool(?) demo

Frontend/Backend split

• Which layer owns which business logic?  That is, what is the separation of concern between various front-end layers, middleware services, and backend services? (parking lot from a previous arch-lunch.) 

Interested stakeholders, please add specific use cases here.

• Registration page
• Submitting a problem

Discussed

• Capturing lightweight decisions in the codebase
• OAuth Scopes design

API strategy

• Distinguish between Emergent APIs vs Intentional? Separate API set as a Product?
• With variations in governance and support model?

• Options
  • Emergent vs Intentional APIs
    • makes sense to curate APIs
    • support-level
  • Legacy vs New
  • API Life-cycle
    • v0→v1
    • enforcement
      • can we do something similar to feature toggle OEP?
• v0 types of APIs - as long as standards are followed
  • throttling
  • permissions
  • versioning
  • deprecation strategy
• idea of who is using what APIs on edx.org?
• any model API that is done the "right" way versus an API that isn't designed well?
• put more thought into our APIs versus implementing new APIs
• we have published APIs in the past, but regressed in docs for the time-being
• DDD-first design for curated APIs 
• interfaces/APIs
  • how to help teams write these more?
• proposed plan (after-meeting discussion)
  • small team dedicated to designing a few "intentional APIs" (a.k.a "API as a Product") that will be published in the API Gateway.
  • the same team will revive and flesh out the API conventions, creating an OEP, so that new "emergent APIs" will also follow the new conventions.
  • FED developers will continue to call Backend "emergent APIs", starting to use updated API conventions.
  • Over-time, we will see how we evolve the API Gateway and how we transition and track "emergent APIs".

• Testing
  • Great summary: https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservice-testing/
  • Can consumer-driven contract testing be a viable alternative to bokchoy in edx-platform?
  • Any concerns with removing bokchoy in edx-platform?
  • Discuss https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/enterprise-wide-integration-test-environments

May 31, 2018