Incubator Manager

Incubator Manager is a local microservices platform for the ILB incubator domain: ten Django REST backend services, Next.js frontend, Nginx gateway, Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, MinIO and Make/Tilt workflow.

Problem

Incubators manage companies, contracts, payments, spaces, bookings, inventory, tickets and documents across staff, client and public audiences. Incubator Manager models those workflows in one local platform.

Contribution

Designed and built the platform as a strict microservices monorepo with ten Django REST services, an Nginx gateway, centralized JWT validation, RabbitMQ domain events, MinIO documents, Redis revocation/rate-limit support, cron sidecars and a Next.js 14 frontend with staff, client and public route groups.

Service And Data Boundaries

Docker Compose runs the microservices locally. Each business domain has a separately deployable Django REST service with its own schema. Requests pass through an Nginx gateway, domain events use RabbitMQ, and the application combines Redis, MinIO object storage, and a Next.js 14 frontend.

Technical Decisions

Ten Django services including auth and documents in the service count

Private schema ownership and UUID cross-service references

Nginx gateway with centralized JWT auth_request and identity headers

RabbitMQ domain event envelope with idempotent consumers

Read-model projections for dashboards

Compose/Tilt local production shape and quality gates

Tradeoffs

Strict service boundaries over monolith convenience , more moving parts, cleaner ownership

Eventual consistency for projections in exchange for service autonomy

Cron sidecars instead of Celery to keep the operational surface small

Compose-based deployment over Kubernetes to match the incubator's actual scale

Outcome

The full production-shaped stack boots locally with a single make command, seeds deterministic demo data, and passes an end-to-end gate: Ruff, ESLint, TypeScript, Vitest, per-service pytest with migration checks, and Playwright smoke tests through the real gateway. The architecture write-up, event catalogue, deployment runbook, and final report ship in the repo's docs.

Stack and domains

Python
Django
Django REST Framework
PostgreSQL
RabbitMQ
Redis
MinIO
Next.js
TypeScript
Ant Design
Nginx
Docker Compose
Tilt

Links

Repositorygithub