Task: Continuous Delivery 3 - Tier
Estimated time/effort: 10-20 hours
Expected delivery time: 7 days
Task scope and expectations
- The purpose of this task is to build a functional real-life application with all listed requirements.
- What we want to see is how you will implement some real-life functionalities by paying attention to details and following good development practices.
- We want to see you understand how to set up a proper project infrastructure, show knowledge of simple problem solving, and knowledge of using your preferred frameworks and libraries.
- Instead of spending a lot of time on providing a custom UI, please rather ensure the functionality is properly done.
Task details
You want to design a continuous delivery architecture for a scalable and secure 3-tier Node application.
Application to use can be found on https://git.toptal.com/henrique/node-3tier-app2
Both web and API tiers should be exposed to the internet and the DB tier should not be accessible from the internet.
You should clone the repository and use it as the base for your system.
- You need to create resources for all the tiers.
- The architecture should be completely provisioned via some infrastructure as a code tool.
- The presented solution must handle server (instance) failures.
- Components must be updated without downtime in service.
- The deployment of new code should be completely automated (bonus points if you create tests and include them in the pipeline).
- The database and any mutable storage need to be backed up at least daily.
- All relevant logs for all tiers need to be easily accessible (having them on the hosts is not an option).
- You should fork the repository and use it as the base for your system.
- You should be able to deploy it on one larger Cloud provider: AWS/Google Cloud/Azure/DigitalOcean/RackSpace.
- The system should present relevant historical metrics to spot and debug bottlenecks.
- The system should implement CDN to allow content distribution based on client location
As a solution, please commit to the Toptal git repo the following:
- An architectural diagram / PPT to explain your architecture during the interview.
- All the relevant configuration scripts (Terraform/Ansible/Cloud Formation/ARM Templates)
- All the relevant runtime handling scripts (start/stop/scale nodes).
- All the relevant backup scripts.
- You can use another git provider to leverage hooks, CI/CD, or other features not enabled in Toptal's git. Everything else, including the code for the CI/CD pipeline, must be pushed to Toptal's git.
The complete solution must be deployed and working before the interview.
Milestones and task delivery
- The deadline to submit your completed project is 1 week from the moment you received the project requirements.
- It means the project code must be submitted within 1 week from the moment that was delivered to you by email.
- If you schedule your final interview after the 1-week deadline, make sure to submit your completed project and all code to the private repository before the deadline.
- Everything that is submitted after the deadline will not be taken into consideration.
- Please do not commit any code at least 6 hours before the meeting time so that it can be reviewed. Anything that is submitted after this time will not be taken into consideration.
- Please join the meeting room for this final interview on time. If you miss your interview without providing any prior notice, your application may be paused for six months.
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