How can I implement a sub-api gateway that can be replicated? - docker

Question

Preface
I am currently trying to learn how micro-services work and how to implement container replication and API gateways. I've hit a block though.
My Application
I have three main services for my application.
API Gateway
Crawler Manager
User
I will be focusing on the API Gateway and Crawler Manager services for this question.
API Gateway
This is a docker container running a Go server. The communication is all done with GraphQL.
I am using an API Gateway because I expect to have different services in my application each having their own specialized API. This is to unify everything.
All it does is proxy requests to their appropriate service and return a response back to the client.
Crawler Manager
This is another docker container running a Go server. The communication is done with GraphQL.
More or less, this behaves similar to another API gateway. Let me explain.
This service expects the client to send a request like this:
{
# In production 'url' will be encoded in base64
example(url: "https://apple.example/") {
test
}
}
The url can only link to one of these three sites:
https://apple.example/
https://peach.example/
https://mango.example/
Any other site is strictly prohibited.
Once the Crawler Manager service receives a request and the link is one of those three it decides which other service to have the request fulfilled. So in that way, it behaves much like another API gateway, but specialized.
Each URL domain gets its own dedicated service for processing it. Why? Because each site varies quite a bit in markup and each site needs to be crawled for information. Because their markup is varied, I'd like a service for each of them so in case a site is updated the whole Crawler Manager service doesn't go down.
As far as the querying goes, each site will return a response formatted identical to other sites.
Visual Outline
Problem
Now that we have a bit of an idea of how my application works I want to discuss my actual issues here.
Is having a sort of secondary API gateway standard and good practice? Is there a better way?
How can I replicate this system and have multiple Crawler Manager service family instances?
I'm really confused on how I'd actually create this setup. I looked at clusters in Docker Swarm / Kubernetes, but with the way I have it setup it seems like I'd need to make clusters of clusters. That makes me question my design overall. Maybe I need to not think about keeping them so structured?

Answer 1

At a very generic level, if service A calls service B that has multiple replicas B1, B2, B3, ... then it needs to know how to call them. The two basic options are to have some sort of service registry that can return all of the replicas, and then pick one, or to put a load balancer in front of the second service and just directly reach that. Usually setting up the load balancer is a little bit easier: the service call can be a plain HTTP (GraphQL) call, and in a development environment you can just omit the load balancer and directly have one service call the other.
/-> service-1-a
Crawler Manager --> Service 1 LB --> service-1-b
\-> service-1-c
If you're willing to commit to Kubernetes, it essentially has built-in support for this pattern. A Deployment is some number of replicas of identical pods (containers), so it would manage the service-1-a, -b, -c in my diagram. A Service provides the load balancer (its default ClusterIP type provides a load balancer accessible only within the cluster) and also a DNS name. You'd configure your crawler-manager pods with perhaps an environment variable SERVICE_1_URL=http://service-1.default.svc.cluster.local/graphql to connect everything together.
(In your original diagram, each "box" that has multiple replicas of some service would be a Deployment, and the point at the top of the box where inbound connections are received would be a Service.)
In plain Docker you'd have to do a bit more work to replicate this, including manually launching the replicas and load balancers.
Architecturally what you've shown seems fine. The big "if" to me is that you've designed it so that each site you're crawling potentially gets multiple independent crawling containers and a different code base. If that's really justified in your scenario, then splitting up the services this way makes sense, and having a "second routing service" isn't really a problem.