Next-gens - Tech Stack

Project Description
Create a dashboard page that monitors API connections.

Tech Stack
This document outlines the recommended technology stack for the “Next-gens”
project, a modern dashboard designed to monitor API connections. The se-
lections prioritize performance, scalability, security, ease of development, and
maintainability, aligning with the project’s goal to provide a robust monitoring
solution for developers and operations teams.
Core Principles Guiding Technology Selection * Performance & Responsiveness:
The dashboard must display real-time or near real-time data efficiently, ensur-
ing a smooth user experience even with high data volumes. * Scalability: The
architecture should support growth in API connections and monitored metrics
without significant re-engineering. * Reliability & Resilience: Technologies are
chosen for their stability and ability to handle potential failures gracefully, ensur-
ing continuous monitoring. * Developer Experience: Tools and frameworks that
enhance developer productivity, enforce best practices, and have strong commu-
nity support are preferred. * Security: Implement robust security measures
across all layers to protect sensitive monitoring data and access. * Modern Aes-
thetics: Support for dark/light themes, green/black color tones, and a modern,
intuitive user interface. * Cost-Effectiveness (long-term): While no immediate
budget limit, selections consider long-term operational efficiency.
Frontend Stack
• Framework: Next.js (React Framework)
– Justification: Next.js offers a powerful, production-ready React
framework with features like Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and
Static Site Generation (SSG) for optimal performance and SEO
(though less critical for a dashboard, it aids initial load times). Its
built-in routing, API routes (for potential backend-for-frontend
patterns), and excellent development experience make it ideal
for a modern, performant dashboard. It natively supports a
component-based architecture for maintainability and scalability.
• Styling: Tailwind CSS
– Justification: A utility-first CSS framework that enables rapid UI
development and highly customizable designs. It’s excellent for im-
plementing modern aesthetics, dark/light themes (using dark: prefix
utilities), and consistent green and black color palettes across the ap-
plication. Its ”just-in-time” compilation ensures minimal CSS bundle
sizes.
• Charting & Data Visualization: Nivo (or similar React charting library
like Recharts/ApexCharts)

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 – Justification: Nivo provides a rich set of highly customizable and
visually appealing React components for various charts (line, bar, pie,
heatmap, etc.). It’s optimized for responsiveness and interactive data
visualization, which is crucial for displaying complex API metrics like
latency, error rates, and throughput effectively to ”developers” and
”operations” teams.
• Data Fetching & State Management: React Query (TanStack Query)
– Justification: Specialized for server-state management, React Query
simplifies fetching, caching, synchronizing, and updating server data
in React applications. For a dashboard constantly pulling API
metrics, it significantly reduces boilerplate, improves performance
through intelligent caching and background re-fetching, and provides
robust error handling, making the UI more resilient and responsive.
Backend Stack (for Data Aggregation, Authentication & API)
• Language & Framework: Node.js with NestJS
– Justification: Node.js is highly performant for I/O-bound operations,
making it suitable for aggregating data from various API connections.
NestJS, a progressive Node.js framework, provides a robust, scalable,
and maintainable application structure (inspired by Angular) out-of-
the-box. It leverages TypeScript for enhanced developer experience
and code quality, which is beneficial for complex applications.
• Authentication & Authorization: JWT (JSON Web Tokens) with Pass-
port.js
– Justification: JWTs offer a stateless authentication mechanism,
which is highly scalable. Passport.js, a popular authentication
middleware for Node.js, provides flexible strategies for implementing
JWT-based authentication, allowing secure access control for dash-
board users (”developers”, ”operations”). Role-based access control
(RBAC) can be easily implemented to restrict access to specific
metrics or actions.
• API Gateway (Optional but Recommended): NGINX / AWS API Gate-
way
– Justification: An API Gateway acts as the single entry point for all
client requests. NGINX can be used as a reverse proxy for load bal-
ancing, SSL/TLS termination, request routing, and basic security. If
hosted on AWS, AWS API Gateway offers managed services for ad-
vanced features like rate limiting, throttling, caching, and integrated
security policies, providing a robust and scalable edge for the backend
services.
Data Storage & Management
• Time-Series Database (for API Metrics): PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB
Extension
– Justification: TimescaleDB transforms PostgreSQL into a powerful
time-series database. It offers the familiarity and robustness of Post-

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 greSQL while providing specialized features for handling time-series
data efficiently, such as automatic partitioning, continuous aggre-
gates, and advanced querying capabilities. This is ideal for storing
and querying metrics like latency, error rates, throughput, status
codes, payload size, and connection counts over time, aligning with
the project’s ”core metrics” data requirements.
• Relational Database (for User/Configuration Data): PostgreSQL
– Justification: A highly reliable, open-source, and feature-rich rela-
tional database. It’s suitable for storing user accounts, dashboard
configurations, API connection details, alerting rules, and other non-
time-series application data. Its ACID compliance, extensive tooling,
and strong community support ensure data integrity and ease of man-
agement.
Monitoring, Logging & Alerting
• Metrics Visualization & Alerting: Grafana
– Justification: Grafana is the industry standard for visualizing time-
series data and creating interactive dashboards. It integrates seam-
lessly with PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB (and other data sources like
Prometheus if added later). It will be used to create the ”Next-gens”
dashboard views, providing rich visualizations for all core metrics.
Grafana also supports robust alerting capabilities, allowing opera-
tions teams to define thresholds and receive notifications.
• Centralized Logging: ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)
– Justification: For collecting, processing, and analyzing application
logs from the backend services and API connections. Elasticsearch
provides powerful search capabilities, Logstash handles data inges-
tion and transformation, and Kibana offers intuitive visualization
and dashboarding for log data, crucial for debugging and operational
insights.
• Error Tracking: Sentry
– Justification: Provides real-time error tracking and performance mon-
itoring for both frontend and backend applications. It helps ”develop-
ers” quickly identify, triage, and resolve issues by providing detailed
stack traces, context, and user information, directly addressing the
”error screen” alerting requirement.
Infrastructure & Deployment
• Cloud Provider: Amazon Web Services (AWS)
– Justification: AWS offers a comprehensive suite of cloud comput-
ing services, providing unparalleled scalability, reliability, and global
reach. Its extensive ecosystem supports all recommended technolo-
gies and provides managed services that can reduce operational over-
head (e.g., Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon EKS for Kuber-
netes).
• Containerization: Docker

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 – Justification: Docker enables packaging applications and their depen-
dencies into portable containers, ensuring consistent environments
from development to production. This simplifies deployment, scal-
ing, and management of both frontend and backend services.
• Container Orchestration: Kubernetes (AWS EKS - Elastic Kubernetes
Service)
– Justification: Kubernetes is the leading platform for orchestrating
containerized applications. It provides automated deployment, scal-
ing, and management of containerized workloads, ensuring high avail-
ability and resilience. AWS EKS offers a managed Kubernetes ser-
vice, simplifying its setup and operation. This choice directly sup-
ports the project’s need for appropriate performance and scalability.
• CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment): GitHub Ac-
tions
– Justification: GitHub Actions provides a powerful and flexible
CI/CD pipeline integrated directly into GitHub repositories. It
automates testing, building, and deployment processes, ensuring
rapid and reliable delivery of new features and bug fixes.
Development Tools
• Version Control: Git & GitHub
– Justification: Industry-standard for distributed version control.
GitHub provides excellent collaboration features, pull requests, code
reviews, and project management tools.
• Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Visual Studio Code (VS
Code)
– Justification: A lightweight yet powerful and highly extensible IDE
with excellent support for JavaScript/TypeScript, React/Next.js,
Node.js, and Docker, making it the preferred choice for development.
• Package Manager: Yarn / npm
– Justification: Standard package managers for Node.js projects, used
for managing project dependencies and running scripts.
Security & Access Control Considerations
• Network Security: Implement VPCs, Security Groups, and Network ACLs
within AWS to isolate resources and control network traffic. Utilize AWS
WAF (Web Application Firewall) for protecting against common web ex-
ploits.
• Data Encryption: Ensure all data at rest (database, storage) and in transit
(API calls, internal communication) is encrypted using SSL/TLS.
• Authentication & Authorization: As detailed in the backend stack, imple-
ment JWT-based authentication for user access to the dashboard. Inte-
grate Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to define granular permissions
for different user roles (e.g., ”developer”, ”operations”).
• API Security: Secure direct API calls via an API Gateway, enforcing
rate limiting, request validation, and potentially API keys or OAuth for

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 external integrations.
• Vulnerability Scanning: Regular security audits and vulnerability scanning
of applications and infrastructure.
• Secrets Management: Utilize AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault
for securely storing and managing sensitive credentials and API keys.
Integration Points
• Direct API Calls: The frontend and/or backend will directly integrate
with the target APIs to fetch real-time connection data. This involves
careful handling of API keys/tokens and rate limits.
• Monitoring Tools: Integration between the backend (NestJS services),
PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB, Grafana, ELK Stack, and Sentry will ensure
a comprehensive monitoring ecosystem.
• Cloud Services: Deep integration with various AWS services for compute,
database, networking, and security.