Containerized Real Time Web Chat Application With Monitoring Stack
INTRODUCTION Modern real-time applications require low latency, high resilience, and continuous observability under varying workloads. This project demonstrates the complete containerized lifecycle of a real-time chat application, covering dockerization, orchestration, monitoring, and performance evaluation using Docker, Kubernetes (Minikube), Prometheus, and Grafana. The system follows a multi-container architecture consisting of a React-based frontend, an Express.js backend, a simulator container for generating baseline chat traffic, and an integrated monitoring stack. The initial implementation utilized Docker Compose to establish inter-container communication, service dependency management, and automated recovery from process failures. The deployment was later migrated to a Kubernetes cluster running on Minikube to leverage features such as automated scaling, service discovery, and load balancing. Mon...