Case Study

Creating REST API-based Email Microservice 

Challenge

The success of any Business depends on streamlined email communication supported by a centralized database. Most businesses struggle with coordinating this across different platforms and departments, which can lead to communication gaps and a proliferation of linguistic styles. In the long run, this hurts the company's brand building and drives up costs.

Solution

With a centralized email service that can be used in numerous programmes and store data in one place, this issue can be mitigated. It helps businesses streamline communication, gain insights into customer behaviour, and make more informed decisions.

Two primary considerations guided our work in establishing a centralized email service.

• To begin, we wanted a unified email service that could be accessed from many programmes and used to streamline the entire emailing procedure.
• As a second need, we wanted a system that would store information in a consolidated database for later examination and study.

Using tools like MailChimp/Mandrill/SendGrid, implementing newly written code, and establishing a microservice were just a few of the possibilities we discussed at length with the team.

Utilizing MailChimp, Mandrill, or SendGrid directly could have helped, but these services have several restrictions. Modifying themes and managing several websites or items can be difficult. It can be implemented into the microservice design focused on email delivery (opened, number of times opened, bounced, etc.).

Coding and integrating from scratch for each new website or product: This strategy was producing problems. The team tested new email methods and code bases frequently. But, starting from scratch made the process long, tough, and frustrating.

A single microservice could serve as the backbone for a number of different websites and projects. In addition, we could use SendGrid, which will allow us to monitor the delivery status of every outgoing email, in this strategy. It can also give us the flexibility to set up a wide range of individualised templates that would be activated in response to a variety of conditions.

We finally decided to use a microservice architecture by writing APIs with Node.js, the Koa.js framework, and SendGrid for their integrated email service. We created a Node.js API microservice that ran on an EC2 microinstance. This microservice API used the Koa.JS framework and SendGrid for sending emails, allowing for custom email templates. The microservice was designed to accept data from form-based web pages and mobile applications via REST APIs, which were then collected in a central database for further analysis. The microservice was configured to send reverse emails to customers, web service administrators, and owners via REST APIs. This facilitated streamlined communication and the quick resolution of any issues that arose.
 

Success Factors

The microservice was deployed on the website, providing a unified email service across multiple applications. The microservice with Rest API development was designed to be scalable, meaning it could be used across multiple applications without the need for significant modifications.

Using this implementation, we were able to streamline the process of sending and receiving emails over REST APIs in a number of different programs. the aggregation of data through REST APIs into a single repository for the purpose of further analysis and insight generation. The approach is scaled to various services as f the microservice can be utilised in other applications through REST APIs without requiring major code changes.