Architecture
Packet Café is laid out in a series of components, each with their own purpose while still being flexible to add or remove components as needed.
There are 7 major components and any number of analytic processes, or tools, that can be included. By default there 9 analytic processes included.
An end user interacts with the ui component for uploading PCAP files and interacting with the results of the analytic processes. The ui component was built with ReactJS and can be scaled out to n instances behind the load balancer.
The lb component is the load balancer which processes requests to both instances of the ui component as well as instances of the web component. It allows both of those components to scale out to n instances as needed.
The web component serves up a RESTful API for retrieving results from the analytic processes and passing them on to the ui component.
Optionally, there is an admin component that serves up a RESTful API for making requests about the service at a global level to identify sessions, IDs, and files.
The messenger component is a RabbitMQ server which brokers messages between the web components, the workers components, and the analytic processes.
The worker component is responsible for taking requests from the web component of files to process and spinning up analytic processes to process those files. These processes can be run in parallel as well as in a pipeline that feeds inputs and outputs in a chain of analytic processes. The worker component can be scaled out to n number of workers and maintains the state and status of jobs in the redis component.
The redis component is a Redis server which stores state and status of jobs across the entire system.
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