Forti

What is it?

Forti is a REST webservice that delivers weather and ocean forecast timeseries data for a specified lat/long coordinate.

The data sources to the service are irregular grids of data, produced by batch jobs. These batch jobs use a wide range of input datasets, and run a set of post-processing algorithms to both improve the forecast quality and to add additional forecast parameters.

The application is built with Go, although with some small parts in C++. It is meant to be run as containers — each component has an associated Dockerfile.

The code for the batch jobs that produce the datasets are not included in this repository.

Getting started

Getting started guide

Development

Test

Architecture

The application is made up of several binaries working together.

• jsonfrontend and xmlfrontend: serves the REST interface.
• healthz: monitors the overall health of the application.
• rawdataforecaster: delivers forecast through a GRPC interface, from either a in-memory cache or from a blob storage.
• correctedforecaster: collects data from the grpc interface, does some post-processing on the forecast and delivers the forecast through the same grpc interface.
• Azure blob storage: Object store containing the latest version of all the forecast data.
• Ecflow: Workflow manager specifying how and when to produce the forecast datasets.
• PPI: Compute, job scheduling and storage system for producing the forecast datasets. Storage system contains most of source data needed to produce the datasets.

C4 container diagram

C4Container
  title C4 Container Diagram - Forti

  Person_Ext(client, "API Client", "Consumes forecast data over REST")
  Person_Ext(dataloader, "Dataset Loader", "Loads forecast datasets into the forti object store")

  Boundary(forti, "Forti") {
    Boundary(core, "Core") {
      Container(frontends, "Frontends", "Go", "Serve point forecast timeseries over REST")
      Container(correctedforecaster, "Correctedforecaster", "Go GRPC", "Post-process and serve forecast data")
      Container(rawdataforecaster, "Rawdataforecaster", "Go GRPC", "Serve forecast from cache or object store")
    }
    Boundary(support, "Support") {
      System(objectstore, "Object Store", "Stores forecast datasets")
      Container(healthz, "Healthz", "Go", "Runs integration tests and reports health")
      System(prometheus, "Prometheus", "Collects metrics from Forti components")
    }
  }

  Rel(client, frontends, "http")
  Rel(frontends, correctedforecaster, "grpc")
  Rel(correctedforecaster, rawdataforecaster, "grpc")

  Rel(dataloader, objectstore, "Upload forecast data")
  Rel(correctedforecaster, objectstore, "Download topography")
  Rel(rawdataforecaster, objectstore, "Read forecast data")

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