GearUp

GearUp is a fully featured, scalable e-commerce platform engineered using a modern Microservices Architecture. Originally conceptualized as an academic project, it has been extensively developed into a commercial-grade system demonstrating advanced distributed system patterns, asynchronous event-driven communication, and real-world third-party integrations.

The platform is divided into two distinct frontend clients (a Storefront and an Admin Dashboard) backed by a robust, decoupled backend ecosystem consisting of 9 dedicated microservices.

🏗️ System Architecture & Infrastructure

To handle commercial-scale traffic and ensure high availability, the backend abandons the traditional monolith in favor of isolated services:

• API Gateway Pattern: An Nginx reverse proxy (Port 5000) acts as the single entry point, securely routing client requests to the appropriate internal services (Auth, User, Cart, Order, Product).
• Event-Driven Communication: RabbitMQ is heavily utilized to decouple services. Time-consuming tasks and cross-service data synchronizations are handled via asynchronous message queues and RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) to prevent HTTP bottlenecking.
• Database Isolation: Following microservice best practices, services manage their own data domains using PostgreSQL via Prisma ORM, while Redis handles high-speed caching and ephemeral session states.
• Containerization: The entire stack is orchestrated using Docker/Podman Compose, ensuring consistent environments from local development (with hot-reloading scripts) to production deployment.

🚀 Key Commercial Features

This project tackles several complex challenges found in real-world commercial applications:

1. Secure Payment Processing (Stripe)

Integrated a dedicated payment-service that communicates securely with the Stripe API. The infrastructure includes a Stripe-CLI sidecar container to actively listen for and forward encrypted payment webhooks to the internal network, ensuring transactions are verified and state changes (e.g., fulfilling an order) are executed reliably.

2. Automated AI Content Moderation

To maintain platform integrity without massive human overhead, the system includes a dedicated moderation-service worker. This service listens to the RabbitMQ bus for new user reviews or media uploads and utilizes AI to automatically flag or reject inappropriate content before it reaches the public storefront.

3. Background Media Processing

Image uploads can severely block the main event loop. GearUp offloads this to a specific media-service worker that processes, resizes, and manages media asynchronously in the background.

4. Real-Time Notifications

A decoupled notify-service listens for system-wide events (e.g., "Order Placed", "Payment Failed") and handles the dispatching of real-time alerts and transactional emails, completely independent of the core ordering logic.

💻 Tech Stack

• Frontend: React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Vite.
• Backend: Node.js, TypeScript, Express, Prisma ORM.
• Infrastructure & DevOps: Nginx, Docker/Podman, RabbitMQ.
• Data Layer: PostgreSQL, Redis (w/ Redis Insight).
• 3rd Party APIs: Stripe (Payments).

Further Reading & Source Code

For a deep dive into the service interactions, RabbitMQ event mapping, and full source code, please visit the repository: GitHub.