Nvolopi: a blazingly fast, ultra lightweight cloud-native file transfer application

Nvolopi is a file transfer system, akin to popular applications like WeTransfer. A user, after signing in, can upload files and share them with a specified group of users via a unique ID, who can then download it after introducing that ID.

Web UI

Authentication UI

Upload UI

Download UI

Architecture

Project Structure

• frontend contains the Dockerfile, nginx config and source code for the frontend service
• services contains the backend service files
  • auth contains the Dockerfile, env variables and source code for the authentication service
  • upload contains the Dockerfile, env variables and source code for the upload/download service
• infra contains the scripts to test and deploy the infrastructure
  • scripts contains a script to stress test the infrastructure and trigger autoscale and a script to push docker images to google cloud registry
  • k8s contains the scripts to deploy the infrastructure
    • root contains the Vagrantfile and its bootstrap script, the main and provider Terraform scripts
    • gcp_gke contains the top level resources (cluster, node_pool, persistent disk) and relevant outputs for k8s
    • gcp_k8s contains all the scripts related to kubernetes including services, deployments, monitoring, etc

Deployment

The Vagrantfile describes the configuration for the management node which is responsible for deploying the entire infrastructure to the Google Cloud.

To deploy the application follow these steps:

1. Create a GCP project
2. Activate the Google Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine APIs
3. Go to IAM->Service Accounts, select the compute engine service account and generate a credentials file in JSON format.
4. Copy terraform.tfvars.example to terraform.tfvars and change the path to the credentials file to the file obtained in step 3.
5. Run the following commands:

cd infra/k8s
vagrant up
vagrant ssh ssh

 # Deploy infrastructure
terraform init
terraform plan -out="terraform-plan"
terraform apply "terraform-plan"

# Destroy infrastructure
terraform destroy
# Destroy management node
vagrant destroy