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Version: 2.1.0

Backend Technologies

Technology List​

The following is a non-exhaustive list of technologies chosen to support backend development on our platform.

  • Keycloak : Identity and access management, as well as authorization.
  • Temporal : Microservice orchestration framework.
  • Open API : HTTP API specification standard.
  • Tile38 : Geofencing server.
  • PostgreSQL : Relational database.

Other Notable Libraries:​

Keycloak​

Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management (IAM) solution developed by Red Hat. Their enterprise fork is called Red Hat Single-Sign On (SSO). It follows the OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 standards and it highly extensible, allowing it to integrate seamlessly with many other applications, frameworks, and even perform user federation and integration with LDAP providers.

As Keycloak acts as our IAM server, it handles the generation of JSON Web Tokens JWT's as well as authentication. Managing Keycloak itself is a large topic, and requires some understanding of OIDC authentication flows, as well as the the security concepts surrounding authentication using JWT's.

Why we've chosen Keycloak​

Red Hat is one of the leading providers of open-source security solutions. They are highly reputable and are leading the development of Keycloak. With it's backing of a strong security-focused company, quick development pace, as well as the ability to provide enterprise support, Keycloak is the obvious choice for for providing OIDC-compliant, cloud-native identity and access management services.

Temporal​

Temporal is an open-source microservice orchestration platform for writing durable workflow as code. It simplifies the difficult problem of distributing workloads across workers, ensuring that they run to completion, performing compensating actions when issues arise, and provides versioning of workflows which is especially necessary for to be able to execute long-running workflows without interruption.

Why we've chosen Temporal​

Temporal's team has a long history of running workflows in the cloud; with a lot of that experience coming from working on large distributed systems at AWS, Microsoft, and Uber. The concepts behind Temporal are elegant and sound, and their company is growing quickly (with one of the highest series B funding rounds in history, including hitting a unicorn valuation at that stage).

They have SDK's that support many languages including Golang, TypeScript, Java, Python, and .NET.

Open API​

Open API, formerly known as Swagger currently is the most widely adopted API specification standard for HTTP API's.

Why we've chosen Open API​

There aren't very many other options, especially ones with strong tooling. AsyncAPI is available for asynchronous API's, but that's about it.

Tile38​

Tile38 is a geospatial database & geofencing server. It allows us to store and make fast queries on geospatial entities in a scalable fashion.

Why we've chosen Tile38​

Tile38 is well design and free and open-source. Other geofencing options are significantly more costly and usually requires integration with a much larger body of products, which might not make sense without going with the full suite of products. Tile38 is a high-quality stand-alone solution that gives us flexibility.

PostgreSQL​

PostgreSQL is a highly popular, advanced open-source relational database with a long history.

Why we've chosen PostgreSQL​

PostgreSQL's wide-adoption and maturity means it is very stable, and problems that are discovered with it have a lot of manpower behind it to resolve those issues quickly. It is also very feature rich, with many plugins, resources, and companies that provide enterprise support, and ones that provide distributed versions of it.