Commercial Bundle Independence

[arelra]

co-authored by: @guardian/commercial-dev

Commercial Bundle Independence 🗽

We wish to migrate the commercial codebase out of Frontend into our own repository.

Currently the commercial bundle is built in Frontend but once we have migrated we will want to build the commercial bundle in our own repository for the following reasons:

• independence from Frontend codebase, build and CI
• independence from any future application platform
• quicker builds and feedback loop
• free to use our own tooling
• not having to consider impact of shared library code on other teams

Current Flow

Currently Frontend passes commercialBundleURL to DCR via the config object

If we bundle externally from Frontend we need a method to provide Frontend (and hence DCR) with the commercialBundleUrl.

Suggestion

AWS Parameter Store

Frontend loads configuration from an AWS Parameter store

Could we write the commercialBundleUrl to the parameter store on every build of commercial?

Questions:

• Can we update Frontend to read the commercialBundleUrl from the AWS parameter store?
• How could we write to Frontend’s parameter store as part of commercial's build process?
  • What permissions are required?
• Does Frontend cache the parameter store on startup?
  • If so, can we invalidate the cache when the store/parameter is updated?
  • If so, could we poll the parameter store?
• Does Frontend cache/memoize config or the DotcomRenderingDataModel?
• Commercial would release independently of Frontend and DCR - i.e. no version locking, is this ok?

Advantages

• Commercial code is completely separated from Frontend and DCR

Disadvantages

• Commercial code is completely separated from Frontend and DCR?
• Is versioning required?
• Commercial release process is more complicated
• Commercial would be responsible for infrastructure and build process to write assets to S3 and config to the parameter store

Next steps

We would be interested in your opinions on the suggestion above and if there are any better approaches.

We would also really value pairing with Webex to explore the problem and spike any candidate solutions.

Thanks!