System Architecture

The System Architecture of our end-to-end test incorporates a platform cluster.

SystemArchitectureFlowChart

Platform Cluster

The platform cluster consists of five Namespaces:

control-plane: constitutes the core of the platform. Its purpose is to build the connection to the external applications, to provide API endpoints, and to ensure that data transactions are properly initiated and managed through restricted workflow-templates. It acts as a central point of control for managing data access and usage and consists of multiple microservices which are described below.
transaction-plane: initiates the transaction-workflow using the provided workflow-templates via Argo Workflows, an open-source container-native workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs on Kubernetes
data-plane: hosts the temporary databases for each transaction, as well as the associated workflow and the workflow-template which will be provided by the external user. The registration process of these workflow-templates is managed by the transaction-service.
base: Keycloak provides the IAM and monitoring functionalities.
prometheus: Prometheus is an open source metrics monitoring tool.

Services

Transaction Service

The transaction-service offers the possibility to start and end the transaction and to start the app workflow.

Functions

endTransaction
startTransaction
startWorkflow
getWorkflow
findTransaction
getAllTransactionIds

Messaging Service

The messaging service is responsible for handling message exchanges between services using HTTP-based messaging.

Functions

postMessage
getMessages

Credential service

This service is responsible for the creation and management of the database credentials.

Functions

createRoleExternal
createRoleInternal

Database service

This service creates and deletes the transaction and safe deposit databases.

Functions (transaction database)

createRolesForDatabase
createTransactionDatabase
deleteRolesForDatabase
deleteTransactionDatabase

Functions (safe-deposit database)

createSafeDepositDatabase
deleteSafeDepositDatabase

App service

This service offers the possibility to find or delete an app, get all app IDs or start the app registration.

Functions

deleteApp
findApp
getAllAppIds
startAppRegistration

Eurodat Client

This client offers the possibility to start or end a transaction or to start a workflow.

Functions

endTransaction
startTransaction
startWorkflow
getWorkflow

Contract service

This service offers the possibility to create, find, or terminate a contract or to get all contracts and the health status.

Contract creation is based on businessID. The businessID is composed of contractType userSubject. For every businessID, there can only be one currently valid contract.

A contract is said to be valid, if its validTo is in the future and validFrom is in the past.

As well as its validity, we store the status of each contract. The status of a contract is one of CREATED, SENT, or SIGNED.

For the sake of auditability, we store all previous versions of contracts, whenever a contract is changed. This means that for any field (other than validTo) changing it is done by terminating the old contract (by setting validTo=now) and creating a new contract with the updated parameter. For example, let's say we have a contract with status SENT. When this contract is signed, we set the validTo of the current contract ot now. We then create a new contract which is a clone of the old one, but with status=SIGNED.

The following figure represents the transition between statuses and its effects on the database.

alt text

Functions

createContract
findContract
getAllContracts
terminateContract