🧩 FastAPI Microservice – User & Widget API

🔧 Project Overview

A complete microservice API built with FastAPI, providing full REST support for user and widget resources. It features JWT authentication, role-based access control, Redis caching, and MongoDB as the data store. Monitoring is handled via Prometheus and Grafana. The system is containerized with Docker and deployed using Kubernetes.

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🧱 Tech Stack

• Python 3.13+
• FastAPI – high-performance async web framework
• MongoDB – data persistence
• Redis – in-memory cache store
• Prometheus + Grafana – monitoring and visualization
• Docker Desktop – image containerization
• Kubernetes – container orchestration
• uv – Python dependency manager

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🗂 Project Structure

project/
├── microservice/
│   ├── api/                    # FastAPI logic
│   │   ├── .cert/              # Certificate files (SSL)
│   │   ├── core/               # Configuration, DB, RBAC
│   │   ├── models/             # MongoDB models
│   │   ├── schemas/            # Pydantic schemas
│   │   ├── scripts/            # Grafana dashboard
│   │   ├── utils/              # Utilities (e.g., sanitizer)
│   │   ├── Dockerfile          # API image definition
│   │   └── main.py             # App entry point
│   ├── .k8s/                   # Kubernetes manifests
│   │   ├── mongodb.yml
│   │   ├── redis.yml
│   │   ├── secret.yml
│   │   ├── service.yml
│   │   ├── deployment.yml
│   │   └── prometheus/
└── README.md

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✅ Features

• User registration and login (with password hashing)
• JWT-based authentication
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
• Widget CRUD functionality
• Redis-based caching
• MongoDB database backend
• Prometheus + Grafana monitoring
• Kubernetes-based deployment

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🚀 Getting Started

1. Clone the repository

git clone git@github.com:Kinetics20/project.git
cd project/microservice/api

2. Install dependencies with uv

uv sync

3. Generate SSL certificates

Navigate to the .cert directory and run:

cd microservice/api/.cert
openssl req -x509 --nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem

These are used for secure authorization.

4. Build Docker image

Go back to the api directory and build the Docker image:

cd ..
docker build -t fast:9 .

If you change the image name (fast:9), update it in .k8s/deployment.yml under containers.image.

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☸️ Kubernetes Deployment

Ensure you have kubectl installed:

sudo snap install kubectl --classic

Apply manifests in the .k8s directory:

cd ../.k8s
kubectl apply -f mongodb.yml
kubectl apply -f redis.yml
kubectl apply -f secret.yml
kubectl apply -f service.yml
kubectl apply -f deployment.yml

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🔍 Check Deployment Status

kubectl get pods

Example output:

NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
mongodb-0                     1/1     Running   ...         ...
redis-xxxxxxx                 1/1     Running   ...         ...
widget-api-xxxxxxx            1/1     Running   ...         ...

For monitoring (namespace monitoring):

kubectl get pods -n monitoring

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📑 API Documentation

Once the application is running, you can access the interactive documentation at:

http://localhost/docs

🔐 Authentication Workflow (Required to Use the API)

To successfully use all CRUD operations on users and widgets, follow these steps:

1. Create an admin user

   • Go to the users section → POST /users/
   • Provide user details and set the status field to admin
   • Example payload:

     {
       "username": "adminuser",
       "password": "yourpassword",
       "status": "admin"
     }

2. Authorize the session

   • Click the Authorize button in the top right of the Swagger UI
   • Enter the JWT token you received after logging in as the admin user

3. Start making authenticated requests

   • After successful authorization, you can now:
     • Create, read, update, and delete users
     • Perform all widget operations (CRUD)
     • Access endpoints protected by authentication

⚠️ Note: If the user is not created with "status": "admin", access to certain endpoints will be restricted.

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📊 Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

This project includes a full monitoring setup using Prometheus and Grafana, deployed via Helm.

🔧 1. Install Helm

First, install Helm on your system:

curl https://baltocdn.com/helm/signing.asc | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/helm.gpg > /dev/null
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https --yes
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/helm.gpg] https://baltocdn.com/helm/stable/debian/ all main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/helm-stable-debian.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install helm

📦 2. Add Helm Repositories

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

🧠 3. Create Monitoring Namespace

kubectl create namespace monitoring

📈 4. Install Prometheus

helm install prometheus prometheus-community/prometheus \
  --namespace monitoring \
  --set alertmanager.persistentVolume.storageClass=hostpath \
  --set server.persistentVolume.storageClass=hostpath \
  --values - <<EOF
server:
  additionalScrapeConfigs:
    - job_name: 'widget-api'
      static_configs:
        - targets: ['widget-api:80']
EOF

This configures Prometheus to scrape metrics from the widget-api container.

📉 5. Install Grafana

helm install grafana grafana/grafana \
  --namespace monitoring \
  --set persistence.storageClassName=hostpath \
  --set persistence.enabled=true \
  --set adminPassword='admin' \
  --values - <<EOF
datasources:
  datasources.yaml:
    apiVersion: 1
    datasources:
    - name: Prometheus
      type: prometheus
      url: http://prometheus-server.monitoring.svc.cluster.local
      access: proxy
      isDefault: true
EOF

Login credentials:

• Username: admin
• Password: admin

🔌 6. Port Forwarding

Forward ports locally to access both dashboards in your browser:

kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/grafana 3000:80

Grafana will be available at:

http://localhost:3000

kubectl port-forward -n monitoring svc/prometheus-server 3001:80

Prometheus will be available at:

http://localhost:3001

🧾 7. Import Dashboard in Grafana

To visualize metrics from the widget-api, import the preconfigured dashboard:

1. Open Grafana → Dashboards → Create → Import

2. Use the file located at:

   microservice/api/scripts/grafana-dashboard.json
   

3. You can upload the file or paste the raw JSON into the text editor.

✅ The dashboard will show live metrics from Prometheus such as pod health, API performance, and request frequency.

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📦 Author

👤 Piotr Lipiński 🗓 Finished: July 2025 📫 Contributions welcome!