Architecture

Here is an overview of XMUX project.

Cluster Architecture

XMUX cluster is designed to be high availability, high performace and extendable. Currently it is running on a set of virtual machines in Xiamen University Malaysia. On top of virtual machines, almost all applications are powered by containerd runtime which provided a virtualization of underlying operating system with higher performance and lower cost for both storage space and computing resources.

Generally, the cluster can be splited into 4 layers. (from buttom to top)

• Cluster Fondations provide the essential environment for all applications above, including kubernetes components, Kube-Router and Longhorn cluster. Kube-Router provide a virtual network shared amone the whole cluster, based on IPVS and BGP. Longhorn stores persistent data produced by upper layer applications with at least 2 replicas in different physical devices.

• Application Fondations provide a set of neccessary services that applications rely on. Prometheus is a monitoring system that collect metrics from all other services and alert cluster manager if some error occured. NATS ensures a high-performace & reliable message delivery for all micro services above. MinIO is an object storage that provides advanced features including cache, compression and encryption. PostgreSQL and MongoDB are different kind of databases for applications to store and query data efficiently.

• Applications layer is the layer for regular applications. XMUS is a set of micro services that drive the XMUX project. The new API(v4) is written with Golang by using Kratos framework while the old API(v2) is written with Node.JS. Dashboards provide a user-friendly interface for monitoring and controlling the cluster. The CI/CD runners also running in the cluster thus they can communicate with other applications easily for testing.

• On top is the load balancer. Nginx reverse proxy server can deliver user requests to different services by their path, which make the cluster can be easily extended according to the load of each service.

Client Architecture

XMUX client is powered by Flutter, which is a UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Currently XMUX client can be run on Android, iOS, web, macOS and Windows.