Arch Forum 2024-04-25

Participants: Backend devs, EMs, Andy, JD and Victor??

Agenda

• Secrets.ps1 & db.ps1 improvements (Lars)
• Firebase

Notes

Secrets.ps1 & db.ps1 improvements: Lars had prepared a demo of some ideas he had on how to improve the secrets.ps1 and db.ps1 helper scripts we have in every repo. Specifically, the idea is to centralize the logic into common scripts in bank-cicd.

No objections came up, it looks like a great improvement and Lars will commit his code and implement in one area to begin with.

Some further ideas were raised and discussed:
- It would be even better with these scripts as python scripts. The good news is that it will be much easier rewrite with the new centralized setup since everything will be in one place!
- Ideally we should not commit secrets to shared resources (i.e. firebase, servicebus etc) to git.
- It would be better if these secrets were in Azure Key Vault.
- Using dotnet secrets manager was raised. However, that is what the scripts are already using.
- When moving to the new secrets setup, we should clean up unused secrets.

Firebase: Recently there have been discussions about usage of Firebase, what should be stored etc. These were shared with everyone and to listen to our current usage. A start of a guideline for Firebase usage is available here: https://dev.azure.com/MAJORITY/Documentation/_wiki/wikis/Main/366/Firebase

Currently, we have basically two use cases:
- Data frequently accessed by apps, like transaction list
- Data apps need to be updated about (i.e. status changes)

Some more details were discussed:
- Versioning of data structure: We have discussed having /v1, /v2 etc, but in the end that was not deemed necessary, to use two versions effectively data has to be written double, so we should try hard to avoid.
- Are there limitations of Firbase? It seems unlikely we would reach any limits, given other very big users of Firebase.
- Are there some general guidelines for Firebase usage, data structure etc?