Weekly Progress Checklist

Use this checklist to track your weekly progress through the implementation roadmap.

Week 1: Foundation Setup ✅

Infrastructure

[ ] Docker Desktop installed and running
[ ] Java 17 (Temurin) installed
[ ] Maven installed and configured
[ ] Local infra running (Postgres, Redis, Kafka)

Product Service

[ ] Product entity created
[ ] ProductRepository implemented
[ ] REST API endpoints working (CRUD)
[ ] Validation added
[ ] Unit tests passing
[ ] Integration tests with Testcontainers
[ ] OpenAPI/Swagger documentation accessible

Validation Checks

[ ] docker ps shows 3 containers
[ ] mvn test passes
[ ] Can create/read/update/delete products via Postman
[ ] Swagger UI accessible at localhost:8080/swagger-ui.html
[ ] Test coverage > 80%

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand Spring Boot basics
[ ] Can explain JPA entities and repositories
[ ] Know how to write REST controllers
[ ] Comfortable with Docker Compose
[ ] Can write unit and integration tests

Week 2: Cart Service + Basic Observability ✅

Cart Service

[ ] Cart and CartItem entities created
[ ] Cart CRUD operations working
[ ] Redis caching implemented
[ ] Cart-to-Product integration working

Observability

[ ] Actuator endpoints enabled
[ ] Health checks working
[ ] Structured JSON logging configured
[ ] Prometheus metrics exposed
[ ] Custom business metrics added

Integration

[ ] Cart service calls Product service
[ ] Retry logic implemented (Spring Retry)
[ ] Error handling graceful

Validation Checks

[ ] Can add product to cart
[ ] Cache hit/miss logged correctly
[ ] /actuator/health returns 200
[ ] /actuator/prometheus shows metrics
[ ] Retry happens on failure

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand service-to-service communication
[ ] Know Redis caching strategies
[ ] Can configure Actuator
[ ] Understand structured logging
[ ] Can create custom metrics

Week 3: Kafka Integration ✅

Kafka Setup

[ ] Kafka (Redpanda) verified running
[ ] Topics created
[ ] Can produce/consume manually

Event Publishing

[ ] ProductCreatedEvent defined
[ ] Event published on product creation
[ ] Event visible in Kafka topic

Event Consumption

[ ] Inventory service created
[ ] Consumes ProductCreatedEvent
[ ] Creates inventory record

Event Patterns

[ ] Event schemas defined
[ ] Schema validation implemented
[ ] Idempotency keys added
[ ] Duplicate detection working

Validation Checks

[ ] Event appears in Kafka after product creation
[ ] Inventory record created on event
[ ] Duplicate events don't create duplicates
[ ] Schema violations fail

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand Kafka concepts (topics, partitions, offsets)
[ ] Know event-driven architecture
[ ] Can implement idempotency
[ ] Understand schema evolution

Week 4: Order Service + Saga ✅

Order Service

[ ] Order and OrderItem entities
[ ] State machine implemented (PENDING → CONFIRMED → PAID → FULFILLED)
[ ] State transitions validated

Saga Pattern

[ ] Inventory reservation working
[ ] Order creation saga functional
[ ] OrderCreatedEvent published

Compensation

[ ] Rollback on inventory failure
[ ] Compensation events published
[ ] Saga timeout configured
[ ] Resource cleanup working

Validation Checks

[ ] Happy path: order created successfully
[ ] Failure path: inventory released on failure
[ ] Saga times out after 30 seconds
[ ] End-to-end order flow works

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand saga pattern
[ ] Know compensation logic
[ ] Can implement state machines
[ ] Understand eventual consistency

Week 5: OpenTelemetry & Tracing ✅

Distributed Tracing

[ ] OpenTelemetry agent added
[ ] OTLP exporter configured
[ ] Jaeger deployed locally
[ ] Traces visible in Jaeger

Custom Spans

[ ] Business operation spans added
[ ] Span attributes configured
[ ] Spans linked across services

Prometheus + Grafana

[ ] Observability stack deployed
[ ] Prometheus scraping metrics
[ ] Grafana accessible
[ ] First dashboard created

Alerting

[ ] Alert rules applied
[ ] Alertmanager configured
[ ] Test alert fired

Validation Checks

[ ] Traces visible in Jaeger UI
[ ] Spans have business context
[ ] Grafana shows live metrics
[ ] Alert fires on simulated error

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand distributed tracing
[ ] Can create custom spans
[ ] Know Prometheus/Grafana basics
[ ] Can configure alerts

Week 6: Advanced Observability ✅

SLO Monitoring

[ ] SLOs defined in yaml
[ ] SLO dashboard created
[ ] Error budget tracked

Latency Monitoring

[ ] Histogram buckets configured
[ ] Latency distribution graphs
[ ] p95/p99 alerts set

Log Aggregation (Optional)

[ ] Loki installed
[ ] Logs searchable

Correlation

[ ] Trace IDs in logs
[ ] Logs linked to traces
[ ] Exemplars in metrics

Validation Checks

[ ] SLO compliance visible
[ ] Latency percentiles charted
[ ] Can jump from metric → trace → logs

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand SLI/SLO/SLA
[ ] Know percentiles and histograms
[ ] Can correlate signals

Week 7: Resilience Patterns ✅

Resilience4j

[ ] Circuit breaker configured
[ ] Circuit opens on failures
[ ] Retry with exponential backoff
[ ] Jitter added

Bulkhead & Rate Limiting

[ ] Thread pool isolation
[ ] Rate limiter on APIs
[ ] 429 responses returned

Fallbacks

[ ] Fallback to cached data
[ ] Default responses
[ ] Graceful degradation

Validation Checks

[ ] Circuit breaker opens/closes correctly
[ ] Retries visible in logs
[ ] Rate limiting throttles requests
[ ] Fallbacks work

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand circuit breaker pattern
[ ] Know retry strategies
[ ] Can implement bulkheads
[ ] Understand graceful degradation

Week 8: Chaos Engineering ✅

Chaos Mesh

[ ] Chaos Mesh installed
[ ] Dashboard accessible

Experiments

[ ] Pod kill experiment run
[ ] Network latency injected
[ ] Packet loss tested

Game Day

[ ] Runbook completed
[ ] Roles assigned
[ ] Game day scheduled

Validation Checks

[ ] Service recovers from pod kill
[ ] Circuit breaker activates on latency
[ ] No cascading failures
[ ] Metrics show impact

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand chaos engineering principles
[ ] Can run chaos experiments
[ ] Know how to document findings
[ ] Can prepare runbooks

Week 9: Load Testing Setup ✅

Gatling

[ ] Gatling project built
[ ] Order flow simulation created
[ ] Load profile configured

Baseline

[ ] Baseline tests run
[ ] Latencies recorded
[ ] Bottlenecks identified

k6 CI

[ ] k6 smoke test created
[ ] Added to GitHub Actions
[ ] Performance gates set

Validation Checks

[ ] Gatling simulation runs successfully
[ ] Baseline in sli-targets.yaml
[ ] k6 runs in CI
[ ] Bottlenecks documented

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand load testing concepts
[ ] Can model realistic user behavior
[ ] Know how to analyze results
[ ] Can identify bottlenecks

Week 10: Performance Optimization ✅

Database

[ ] Indexes added
[ ] Connection pool tuned
[ ] Query times improved 50%+

Caching

[ ] Cache warming implemented
[ ] Cache hit ratio > 80%
[ ] HTTP caching (ETags)

Validation

[ ] Re-run load tests
[ ] 30%+ improvement in p95
[ ] Improvements documented

Validation Checks

[ ] No connection timeouts
[ ] Cache hit ratio metric
[ ] 304 responses for unchanged resources
[ ] Performance improved

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand database optimization
[ ] Know caching strategies
[ ] Can measure performance improvements
[ ] Understand HTTP caching

Week 11: Security Hardening ✅

Dependency Scanning

[ ] OWASP Dependency Check run
[ ] Vulnerable deps updated
[ ] No CRITICAL CVEs

Container Security

[ ] Trivy scan clean
[ ] Distroless images used

Authentication

[ ] JWT generation working
[ ] JWT validation filter
[ ] Endpoints secured

OWASP ZAP

[ ] ZAP baseline scan run
[ ] Issues fixed
[ ] No HIGH findings

Secrets

[ ] Secrets externalized
[ ] No secrets in code

Validation Checks

[ ] Protected endpoints require auth
[ ] Clean security scans
[ ] Secrets in env vars

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand common vulnerabilities
[ ] Know JWT authentication
[ ] Can use security scanning tools
[ ] Understand secrets management

Week 12: CI/CD Pipeline ✅

Build Pipeline

[ ] GitHub Actions configured
[ ] Build runs on push
[ ] Dependencies cached

Quality Gates

[ ] Test coverage gate (80%)
[ ] Security scan gate
[ ] Build fails on issues

Contract Testing

[ ] Pact consumer tests
[ ] Contracts published
[ ] Contract stage in CI

Docker

[ ] Images built in CI
[ ] Tagged with SHA
[ ] Pushed to registry

Validation Checks

[ ] Build passes on push
[ ] Poor quality blocked
[ ] Contract breaking changes detected
[ ] Images available in registry

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand CI/CD concepts
[ ] Know quality gates
[ ] Can write contract tests
[ ] Understand image tagging

Week 13: gRPC Implementation ✅

gRPC Service

[ ] Proto file defined
[ ] Java code generated
[ ] gRPC service implemented
[ ] gRPC server running

gRPC Client

[ ] Client stub created
[ ] Order service calls inventory
[ ] gRPC errors handled

Observability

[ ] gRPC interceptors added
[ ] gRPC metrics exposed
[ ] Traces in Jaeger

Resilience

[ ] Retry policy configured
[ ] Deadlines set
[ ] Failure scenarios tested

Validation Checks

[ ] gRPC calls work via grpcurl
[ ] Order → Inventory via gRPC
[ ] Traces show gRPC spans
[ ] Retries work

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand Protocol Buffers
[ ] Know gRPC vs REST tradeoffs
[ ] Can implement gRPC services
[ ] Understand gRPC error handling

Week 14: WebSocket & SSE ✅

WebSocket

[ ] Notification service created
[ ] WebSocket endpoint configured
[ ] Order status notifications
[ ] JWT authentication

SSE

[ ] SSE endpoint for flash sales
[ ] Events broadcast
[ ] Reconnection handled

Load Testing

[ ] Gatling WebSocket scenario
[ ] 1000+ concurrent connections
[ ] Resource usage monitored

Validation Checks

[ ] WebSocket connection works
[ ] Real-time updates received
[ ] SSE events delivered
[ ] Handle 1000+ connections

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand WebSocket protocol
[ ] Know SSE use cases
[ ] Can secure WebSocket
[ ] Understand real-time scaling

Week 15: CDC & Projections ✅

Debezium

[ ] Debezium connector deployed
[ ] CDC for orders table
[ ] CDC events in Kafka

Projections

[ ] orders_by_customer projection
[ ] Built from CDC events
[ ] Stored in database

Kafka Streams

[ ] Streams app created
[ ] Order totals aggregated
[ ] Windowing configured

Replay

[ ] Replay service skeleton
[ ] Events replayed
[ ] Projection validated

Validation Checks

[ ] DB changes in Kafka
[ ] Projection stays in sync
[ ] Aggregations correct
[ ] Replay rebuilds projection

Learning Verification

[ ] Understand CDC concepts
[ ] Know projection patterns
[ ] Can use Kafka Streams
[ ] Understand event replay

Week 16: Production Readiness ✅

Documentation

[ ] READMEs updated
[ ] ADRs documented
[ ] Runbooks created

Kubernetes

[ ] Helm charts created
[ ] Resource limits set
[ ] Health probes added
[ ] Services deployed to K8s

Game Day

[ ] Multi-service chaos
[ ] Team participated
[ ] Incident documented

Retrospective

[ ] Retro completed
[ ] Learnings documented
[ ] Phase 2 planned

Validation Checks

[ ] Docs peer-reviewed
[ ] Services run in K8s
[ ] Chaos handled gracefully
[ ] Retro notes captured

Learning Verification

[ ] Can document architecture
[ ] Understand Kubernetes
[ ] Know incident management
[ ] Can reflect and improve

Progress Tracking

Week	Status	Completion %
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15	⏳	0%
16	⏳	0%

Legend: ✅ Complete | 🔄 In Progress | ⏳ Not Started

Tips for Success

Check off items as you complete them - Immediate satisfaction!
Don't skip validation checks - They ensure quality
Learning verification is crucial - Understanding > completion
Document blockers in notes - Help for troubleshooting
Celebrate weekly wins - Track your progress!

When Blocked

[ ] Checked existing documentation
[ ] Searched official docs
[ ] Reviewed similar code
[ ] Asked AI assistant with context
[ ] Took break and came back
[ ] Documented issue for help

Start Date: _
Target Completion: _
Actual Completion: ____