Node-chat-server

This is a side project that was stared in April of the year 2021. The main goal was to build a production-ready, error-resistant, fast, and highly scalable chatting server with support for groups, text channels, voice channels, and self-messaging. It was first developed as a monolithic architecture with Redis caching and its publisher/subscriber system integrated to establish communication between horizontally scaled server processes.

However, recently the whole codebaes is being revamped to move to microservice architecture with gRPC support for information exchange between independently running services. Also, here instead of using mongoose, Prisma is used to easily move to another DB (e.g. PostgreSQL) with minimal changes if required.

Architecture

Currently, these are the services present in this architecture-

• auth - Responsible for authentication and JWT token validation. All other services call this service to validate the JWT access token. Besides running gRPC server, it also provides a REST client for the end users. Prisma is used to handle MongoDB database connection and operations.
• rest - Provides all the major REST APIs (CRUD APIs for groups, channels, self messages, etc.) for clients. For now, mongoose is used for MongoDB operations.
• group - Exposes a public REST API to fetch group information, add members, add channels, and do all the group-specific activities. Also, there is a gRPC server that the socket service uses to retrieve the member lists of the group. Prisma is used to handle database operations. Depends on the auth service to check JWT authentication.
• message - Provides gRPC API for socket service to save new messages. Connected to auth service through gRPC to validate authorization.
• socket - Responsible for opening socket connections between server and client. Authentication is required to establish the connection, hence using auth service through gRPC. In a chat application, database reads for messages are significantly low compared to database writes.

There would be three ways to save messages in the database —

• The message is saved in the database through REST API asynchronously and also at the same time it is sent to the socket server. This workflow is terrible since there is no consistency at all. The message may not be saved in the database for some erroneous reasons but is successfully broadcasted to the recipients. Overall the UX would not be good at all.
• First, call the REST API to save the message in the Database. If the response is OK, then send it to the socket server which will broadcast the message to all other group members or friends.

The problem here is the delay. The REST request may take some time because, for each message, it creates a costly TCP connection to a remote server placed somewhere in the world and the server then writes the message in the database and finally returns the response.

The whole process is costly. Imagine you are spamming in a group channel at your full speed and your browser ends up creating lots and lots of TCP REST requests. Message brokers can obviously be used but that helps the server side only.

• Another way would be to pass the message to the socket server which ultimately saves the message through a gRPC call to the message service. The benefit here is that the browser doesn’t need to create tons and tons of TCP connections to the server. There is only one TCP connection to the socket server and gRPC uses binary protobuf protocol for communication which is way faster than the REST thing.

After the message is saved in the database, the socket server can pass the acknowledgment receipt back to the socket client and asynchronously broadcast the message to other socket clients. And again something like RabbitMQ can be used to prevent the Database from getting bombarded with write requests.

Technologies used:

• Node.js
• Express
• Mongoose
• Prisma
• grpc
• Typescript
• JWT
• Socket.io
• Redis
• Bcrypt
• Docker
• NGINX
• Github Actions
• C++ (No use for now)