MongoDB World 2017: Building Micro-Services Based ERP System

Jerry M Reghumadh of Capiot did a talk on building micro-services from the ground up.  The legacy system that his group replaced was monolithic and rigid.  The solution the Capiot team proposed to the client placed each component of the ERP system into its own atomic component.  Everything on the platform that was built was an API.  These API's were very "chatty".

The engineering decisions that were made included the choice of NodeJS and MongoDB as the base technologies for this platform.  NodeJS was selected in part, because of its small footprint.  This lowered the barrier to entry for the application.  Java was considered, but it was too heavy for the needs of the project.  MongoDB was selected for the data persistence layer because it saves data as documents and it did not require the marshaling and unmarshaling of data.  MongoDB also allowed the implementation team to use a flexible schema.  MongoDB offered greater ease of clustering and sharding versus other available options for this project.  This allowed the developers to implement this without relying on a dedicated database administrator.
The technology stack included:

• NodeJS
• ExpressJS
• Swagger.io
• Mongoose.js
• Passport.js

The team implemented a governance model that forced any exposed API to be exposed in Swagger.  This prevented the proliferation of "rogue" API's.  Any API not exposed in swagger would not work properly in the system.  Mongoose allowed the team to enforce a schema.