Planning the Game Services Reliability Platform

Devlog - 2026-04-23

Overview

Developed the plan and framework that the entire project would be built behind: a production-style backend platform designed to demonstrate DevOps, DevSecOps, and reliability engineering through a small distributed system.

This project is focused on operating and securing backend services, not building a playable game. It simulates a real service environment where traffic can be routed, jobs processed, data stored, deployments automated, and failures observed.

Core Architecture

The initial platform design includes:

• API service
• Worker service
• PostgreSQL database
• Redis queue
• Monitoring and logging
• CI/CD pipeline

Planning Artifacts

The project started with a structured plan covering class diagrams, project scaffolding, a Mermaid-style architecture diagram, a roadmap, a TODO list, and source notes.

The intended shape is a single repo that is:

• Docker-driven
• Local-development friendly
• Kubernetes-enabled later
• Designed for secrets management through Vault
• Designed for policy checks through OPA
• Built around continuously manipulated topology data

Docker Compose was selected for the first version because it supports multi-container applications, health checks, named volumes, and multiple Compose files that can be merged or overridden by file order. That makes it practical for quick development and staging spin-ups under a strict timeline.

Terraform Environment Note

HashiCorp’s Terraform documentation warns that CLI workspaces are separate state instances, not a true environment-separation model when different environment variables, IAM credentials, and isolation boundaries are required. That note will shape how later infrastructure work is structured.

Recommended v1 Stack

The first concrete stack target is:

• FastAPI for API services and OpenAPI-based endpoint development
• Redis as the queue, using documented reliable queue patterns with blocking operations
• PostgreSQL for durable relational state
• NGINX as the gateway, traffic switch, and future load-balancing layer
• Docker Compose for local orchestration
• Prometheus + Grafana for metrics, dashboards, and alerting visibility
• OpenTelemetry + Jaeger for distributed traces
• GitHub Actions for CI/CD
• Trivy + Syft for image scanning and SBOM generation
• Cosign as an optional artifact signing stretch goal if the security work finishes early
• tc/netem for latency injection and failure simulation

References

• Terraform CLI workspaces