The standard architecture for modern web applications involves a decoupled frontend, typically built with a JavaScript framework, and a backend API. This pattern is powerful but introduces complexity in managing two separate codebases, development environments, and the API contract between them.

This article explores an alternative approach: an integrated architecture where the backend API and the frontend UI are served from a single, cohesive Python application.

In this series, we develop real-time monitoring dashboard applications. A data generating app is created with Python, and it ingests the theLook eCommerce data continuously into a PostgreSQL database. A WebSocket server, built by FastAPI, periodically queries the data to serve its clients. The monitoring dashboards will be developed using Streamlit and Next.js, with Apache ECharts for visualization. In this post, we walk through the data generation app and backend API, while the monitoring dashboards will be discussed in later posts.

Traefik is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer. In this post, it'll be demonstrated how path-based routing can be set up by Traefik with Docker. Also a centralized authentication will be illustrated with the Forward Authentication feature of Traefik.

In this post, I'll illustrate how a web service is created using FastAPI framework where tasks are sent to multiple workers. The workers are built with Celery and Rserve. Redis is used as a message broker/result backend for Celery and a key-value store for Rserve. Demos can be run in both Docker Compose and Kubernetes.