Adding a service e.g. search

[jamesgorrie]

This document is here to help people understand how they might run experiments, change things, and create and test new content on www.theguardian.com

Routing

Routing to www.theguardian.com starts at Fastly. While there is a lot that happens in Fastly, from a routing perspective, it is fairly slim, and passes all requests onto our Router service, an Nginx service.

Router

Router then matches on the URL and determines which AWS stack's Elastic Load Balancer to send the request to.

e.g. https://github.com/guardian/platform/pull/1523

Data fetching

Frontend is a set of microservices based around the different things we engage with readers around on www.theguardian.com e.g.

• Articles
• Fronts
• Commercial
• Onwards journeys
• RSS
• Sport
• Other
  • Crosswords
  • Email newsletters
  • Email forms
  • Surveys (❌ deprecated)
  • Indexes (subjects and contributors)
  • Atom embeds
  • A/B testing opt in/out
  • Newspaper pages
  • Config
  • Galleries
  • Images
  • Audio
  • Video
  • Interactives
  • Pagination control

The Elastic Load Balancer will balance traffic to a set of EC2 instances that will be running your Scala app to fetch data.

If your feature or service already has a relevant app, you can add to that app's route file e.g. for articles.

You will need to ensure that the route in the router service matches that or the app routing. e.g. Search in router matches Search route in app

If none of the above suites your purpose, you'll need to spin up a new app

App bootstrap

Here is an example of an app's bootstrap.