Project Overview

A polyglot three-tier microservices e-commerce application — a playful "Secret Shop" storefront where you browse mission gear, add items to a Loadout (cart) and move through a multi-step checkout. It is the kind of distributed, real-world workload that makes container orchestration and GitOps genuinely worth it — multiple independent services, each with its own datastore, deployed to Kubernetes and kept in sync from Git.

A real distributed system — independent services, each container-packaged and Helm-templated — delivered to Kubernetes through an ArgoCD GitOps workflow.

What the App Does

• Storefront: a home page with featured "Mission Critical Gear" and a product grid.
• Gadget Repository (catalog): full product listing with category filters — Vehicles, Accessories, Clothing, Food.
• Loadout (cart): add/remove items, adjust quantity and view a running subtotal.
• Multi-step checkout: Rendezvous Location (address) → Covert Delivery (shipping) → Mission Funding (payment), with a live order summary (subtotal, taxes, shipping, total).

Architecture & Microservices

• Three tiers: presentation (UI storefront) → application services (catalog, cart, checkout, orders) → data (a dedicated datastore per service).
• Polyglot & independent: each service is its own container, independently buildable and deployable.
• Backing stores: per-service databases and messaging (e.g. relational DB, key-value cache and a message queue) keep services loosely coupled.
• Helm-packaged: every microservice is templated and versioned as a Helm chart for repeatable installs.

GitOps Deployment

• Cluster: runs on AWS EKS (Kubernetes), with the cluster and supporting infrastructure provisioned via Terraform.
• Dedicated gitops branch: the Kubernetes manifests / Helm values live on a separate gitops branch — the single source of truth for what runs in the cluster.
• ArgoCD reconciliation: ArgoCD continuously watches that branch and syncs the live cluster to match it — no manual kubectl apply.
• Release flow: CI builds and pushes each service's image; bumping the image tag in the gitops branch is a single commit that ArgoCD rolls out automatically.
• Safe & auditable: every deployment is a Git change — fully reviewable, with one-commit rollbacks and self-healing drift correction.

Together it shows the full DevOps loop on a realistic distributed app: independent microservices, container-packaged and Helm-templated, delivered to Kubernetes through an auditable, self-healing GitOps pipeline.