benzinga-backend-challenge

Benzinga Backend Challenge, a simple webhook receiver and forwarder.

The application should be a basic webhook receiver that has two endpoints.

1. GET /healthz - should return HTTP 200-OK and “OK” as a string in the body
2. POST /log - should accept JSON payload

{
    "user_id": 1,
    "total": 1.65,
    "title": "delectus aut autem",
    "meta": {
        "logins": [{
            "time": "2020-08-08T01:52:50Z",
            "ip": "0.0.0.0"
        }],
        "phone_numbers": {
            "home": "555-1212",
            "mobile": "123-5555"
        }
    },
    "completed": false
}

Requirements

• The application should have three configurable values that should be read from environment variables:
  • batch size
  • batch interval
  • post endpoint
• The application should deserialize the JSON payload received at /log endpoint into a struct.
• Retain them all in-memory.
• When batch size is reached OR the batch interval has passed forward the collected records as an array to the post endpoint.
• Clear the in-memory cache of objects.
• Logger ("github.com/sirupsen/logrus")
  • log an initialization message on startup
  • On each HTTP request
  • Each time it sends a batch
    • log the batch size.
    • result status code.
    • duration of the POST request to the external endpoint.

Addtional Requirements

• If the POST fails
  • Retry 3 times, waiting 2 seconds before each retry.
  • After 3 failures log this failure and exit.
• Testing for the Post endpoint output will be done against a service such as http://requestbin.net.

Arguments

• Can be set through os env or overriding through flag args passed while running the build
• Flags

batch-interval duration
        Batch Interval (default 10s)
  -batch-size int
        Batch Size (default 10)
  -http string
        HTTP  (default ":8080")
  -post-endpoint string
        Post Endpoint

OR

• Env

WEBHOOK_POST_ENDPOINT=
   
    
WEBHOOK_BATCH_SIZE=
    
     
WEBHOOK_BATCH_INTERVAL=
     

     
    
   

Algorithm / Implementation

• A buffered channel is init at program startup, if batch size > 0, buffered channel = 2*batch_size or 100 by default.
• Buffered channel will make sure, /log is not blocked deserializing while the forwarder consumer is processing.
• At same, time HTTP handlers / receivers are regsitered. (Routing is handled via gorrila/mux).
• /log recieves the json, deserialize it in the defined struct and pushes to the buffered channel.
• A forwarder consumer is started in the background and it iterates over buffer channel and starts pushing to unbuffered channel to be processed by another background consumer.
• forwarder consumer itself regsiter a background process which starts a forever blocking select channel.
• select channel has three cases, either a batch_size is full or batch_interval is reached or accumualte the msg in in-memory array.
• When the batch(size/interval) limit is reached, it forwards the accumualted msgs to webhook endpoint as per the requirement.
• if there is a error in the "post call" after three retries, it sends the error to err channel and the programs exits as per the requirement.

Scope of Improvements

• Start forwarder consumer in waitgroup so it multiple consumers could be started in background in case of high throughput.
• Add more unit tests 🙈

github-action

• On every push to github, it runs linter / test and docker build
• #TODO upload the docker build to GCR (but it requires a paid gcr account)

Build

• make build puts the binary executable in $root/build folder.
• it's good to run make lint test before the make build command to ensure lint and test passes.
• make docker-build generates the docker image in $root/build folder.

Lint

• make lint runs the golang-ci lint (installs it if not present) and runs the linter as defined in root/.golangci.yml.

Test

• make test runs all the test in main package and generates the coverage report.

cmd

• main http service is inside the cmd/benzinga-backend-challenge

Postman Code for easy accesibilty

• Log Payload

curl -X POST \
  http://localhost:8080/log \
  -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "user_id": 1,
    "total": 1.65,
    "title": "delectus aut autem",
    "meta": {
        "logins": [{
            "time": "2020-08-08T01:52:50Z",
            "ip": "0.0.0.0"
        }],
        "phone_numbers": {
            "home": "555-1212",
            "mobile": "123-5555"
        }
    },
    "completed": false
}'

• Health Check

curl -X GET \
  http://localhost:8080/healthz \
  -H 'cache-control: no-cache'