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Airy Core architecture

Overview#

Airy Core is a conversational platform that contains a backend and frontend system.

The backend system is a streaming platform. Its role is to:

  • Ingest conversational events from different connectors (mostly via webhook integrations), process them, and store them in an Apache Kafka cluster.
  • Make the processed events available and accessible through the Core API.
  • Expose conversational events via a webhook integration.
  • Manage authentication and authorization features.

The frontend system contains Inbox and Control Center web applications and the JavaScript integration of the Chat Plugin.

All of these functionalities are packaged in entities called Airy Components. Components are part of a repository. By default, the airy-core repository is added to an Airy Core installation. The conversational platform can further be extended with additional repositories and third party components.

The airy-core repository is comprised of the following Airy Components:

Apps#

An App is a component or a collection of components which are interconnected and can be used to build any kind of application inside the Airy system.

Components#

A Component is a single unit which is used to build an App alone or together with other Components. There are different types of Components:

  • connector - a connector is a component which is used to ingest events from and to a different source.
  • ui - a UI component is a component which is used to display the events in a user interface.
  • api - an API component is a component which is used to expose the events to a third party.

Connectors#

The connectors are following a specific naming pattern:

  • sources-CONNECTOR_NAME - Components which send and receive events to external platforms or systems. Example: sources-facebook, sources-google, sources-twilio.

API#

  • api-admin - Backend services for administration of messaging sources and destinations
  • api-communication - Backend services which expose conversations and messages
  • api-websocket - Backend services which streams messages and more via websocket [docs]

Webhook#

  • webhook-publisher - Processes conversational data and write in Redis the events to be exposed to external parties
  • webhook-consumer - Reads from Redis and send events to external webhooks

Frontend#

  • frontend-inbox - Web application for viewing messages
  • frontend-chat-plugin - Web chat plugin

Pods#

Since Airy is built on Kubernetes pods are the smallest deployable unit and therefore are used to compose components. A Component can have multiple Services / Pods.

Airy Controller#

Airy Core ships with a Kubernetes controller, which is responsible for starting and reloading the appropriate Airy Components based on the provided configuration. The controller is a deployment named airy-controller.

Airy CLI#

Every release features a command line binary, used to configure and fetch status information from your Airy Core instance. This tool is referred to as the Airy CLI throughout the documentation.

Sensitive data#

Application data#

All the application data is stored in the Kafka cluster and the topics which are created for the components. As the Kafka cluster is backed up by persistent EBS storage, the data is stored on the PersistentVolumes defined in the Kubernetes cluster. At the moment, the data in the Kafka topics is not encrypted.

Configuration data#

All the credentials, keys and secrets which the user can overwrite can be configured in the airy.yaml file. When running airy create or airy config apply these values are mapped into the following ConfigMaps inside the kafka cluster:

  • security ConfigMap - holding the necessary security parameters.
  • {component-type}-{component} ConfigMap - holding the configuration for individual sources and components
  • airy-config-map ConfigMap - storing a copy of the airy.yaml config file, inside the Kubernetes cluster.
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