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Grants Ingest Service

Ingests and indexes data related to grants.

What's this?

This repository contains both IaC (terraform) and runtime code for the Grants Ingest pipeline service. The purpose of this service is to collect information about grant opportunities from third party sources, such as Grants.gov, and organize that data into per-grant data records that can be consumed whenever updates to the underlying data occur.

Architecture

This service consists of an event-driven pipeline that uses AWS Lambda for running various compute tasks. Additionally, Amazon S3 is used for archival storage of raw source data, while DynamoDB provides an active index of processed grant opportunity records. At the end of the ingestion pipeline, newly-created/-updated grant opportunity records are sent to an event bus that delivers the updates to subscribers.

High-level architecture
Component-level architecture

Code Organization

Code for this service can generally be considered under two categories:

IaC

Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) used to provision the target environment, which is written with Terraform, and normally run during deployment. The main Terraform project is located in this directory; infrastructure specific to a particular step in the pipeline is organized into Terraform modules located within the modules subdirectory.

Runtime

Runtime code that executes (e.g. by AWS Lambda) within the target environment in response to some triggering event. Runtime code is written using Go (currently targeting version 1.23.x), which is organized in the repository root directory according to the following conventions:

  • cmd/: This directory contains one subdirectory per Lambda function, and should provide a single main package that can be compiled into a per-function binary. Each subdirectory of cmd should have a name that obviously aligns with the particular Lambda function for which it is written (which generally should correspond to the Terraform module directory used to provision the Lambda function and its dependencies). For example:
    • Lambda handler code: cmd/DownloadGrantsGovDB
    • Terraform module: modules/DownloadGrantsGovDB
  • pkg/: This directory contains "library code" used by one or more Lambda functions in the project, organized into per-package subdirectories according to Go convention.
  • internal/: This directory is similar to pkg/ but contains packages that are only intended to ever be used internally by this project and make no guarantees about third-party compatibility. Generally, reusable libraries providing common functionality used by multiple Lambda functions should reside here.

Development

During development, infrastructure and runtime code can be tested by configuring Terraform to target an actual ("sandbox", dedicated for development) AWS environment or a mock AWS environment simulated with LocalStack if an AWS sandbox environment is unavailable.

Configuring Terraform and LocalStack

Prerequisites

To begin, make sure the following tools are available in your development workspace:

Note: This document assumes usage of Docker-Compose method. However, you can choose whatever LocalStack installation option best suits your environment.

Tip

Check that you have the necessary dependencies for LocalStack development by running task local:check-dependencies

Environment Variables

We recommend setting the following environment variables in your development workspace when working with LocalStack:

  • AWS_SDK_LOAD_CONFIG=true
  • AWS_REGION=us-west-2
  • AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-west-2
  • AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=testing
  • AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=testing
  • LOCALSTACK_VOLUME_DIR
    • Should be set to whatever path you want to persist LocalStack data. If not set, the default behavior is to target a ./volume subdirectory from where docker compose is run.

Provisioning Infrastructure

Quickstart

Certain steps described in the "Manual Provisioning" section below may be achieved using the following shortcut commands provided by this repository's Taskfile:

  • Prerequisite: Ensure LocalStack is started by running docker compose up -d
  • Deploy to LocalStack for the first time: task local:from-scratch
  • Subsequent deployments to LocalStack: task local:deploy
  • Invoke the DownloadGrantsGovDB Lambda function: task local:invoke-DownloadGrantsGovDB

See .taskfile/local.yml for more information and other shortcuts.

Manual Provisioning

After starting LocalStack, create a terraform state deployment bucket in the localstack environment. This guide, as well as the provided Terraform backend file for local development, assumes that this bucket is named local-terraform and has a region of us-west-2.

To create this bucket, navigate to the terraform folder, then run the following command:

awslocal s3 mb s3://local-terraform

If using the provided docker-compose then this runs when the localstack container is started.

Next, initialize the Terraform project using the local.s3.tfbackend Terraform state backend configuration file provided by this repository. Note that you may need to modify the endpoint setting in this file if your LocalStack environment uses a different host/port other than the default of localhost:4566.

tflocal init -backend-config="local.s3.tfbackend" -reconfigure

Once this command completes successfully, use tflocal to "provision" mock infrastructure in your LocalStack environment. This will create the Lambda functions, so it requires the functions to be built first. Use task build to build the functions. Then use the local.tfvars file provided by this repository to provision the mock infrastructure:

tflocal apply -var-file=local.tfvars

Hint: It's normal for task build and/or tflocal apply to run for up to a few minutes. If you notice that these commands are taking an excessively long time or seem to hang, try cancelling the operation, then run task prebuild-lambda and try running your command again.

Running Lambda Functions

Once your Lambda function has been deployed to your running LocalStack environment, you can invoke it in order to test its execution and observe log output. Since each Lambda function behaves differently and expects different inputs, the exact nature of the debugging cycle will vary between functions. However, the following example demonstrating invocation of the function defined in module.DownloadGrantsGovDB may be used as a starting point.

In general, Lambda functions are invoked with a JSON payload that represents the event input expected by the Lambda handler. Again, the structure of this payload varies depending on the invocation source(s) configured for each Lambda function. In the case of the Lambda function defined in module.DownloadGrantsGovDB, the expected payload is a JSON object containing a "timestamp" key whose value is an ISO-8601 timestamp string, from which the date of a desired Grants.gov database export is derived. For example:

{"timestamp": "2023-03-20T05:00:00-04:00"}

When using awslocal (or the official AWS CLI, for that matter), also note that the payload must be provided as a Base64-encoded encoded representation of the payload. The following example demonstrates an invocation of a Lambda function named grants-ingest-DownloadGrantsGovDB that provides the above example JSON in Base64 encoding and prints the Lambda output to stdout:

awslocal lambda invoke \
    --function-name grants-ingest-DownloadGrantsGovDB \
    --payload $(printf '{"timestamp": "2023-03-20T05:00:00-04:00"}' | base64) \
    /dev/stdout
null
{
    "StatusCode": 200,
    "LogResult": "",
    "ExecutedVersion": "$LATEST"
}

The above output displays the Lambda function invocation result following its successful execution; the output you see will vary depending on the input, the function version that was invoked, whether an unhandled error cause execution to fail, etc.

In order to view execution logs outputted during Lambda invocation, use CloudWatch Logs (just as you would when conducting tests against a genuine AWS environment). The following command can be used to observe log output in real-time:

awslocal logs tail /aws/lambda/grants-ingest-DownloadGrantsGovDB --follow

When actively debugging, it is useful to run a command similar to the above in a separate terminal prior to invoking the Lambda function under test, as it only displays logs emitted after the awslocal logs tail started. You can use the --since option (with or without --follow) in order to display historical logs from previous invocations. For example, the following command shows logs emitted in the past 1 hour, and will continue to display new logs as they are emitted:

awslocal logs tail /aws/lambda/grants-ingest-DownloadGrantsGovDB --since 1h --follow

Running Common Tasks

This repository provides a Taskfile.yml file for defining and running common tasks related to development. You can install the task utility and then run task in your command-line environment to see a list of the available helpers.

Go compiler architecture

This project is configured to target ARM64 CPU architecture when building Go binaries, since that is what we run on staging and production. Some contributors who develop on 64-bit Intel machines may have issues running Lambdas on LocalStack with this configuration. Currently, the suggested workaround is to make the following modifications to target 64-bit Intel when building locally and deploying to LocalStack:

  • In Taskfile.yml, modify the go-build-lambda task's command to set GOARCH=amd64 (replaces GOARCH=arm64).
  • In terraform/local.tfvars, add the following Terraform input variable: lambda_arch = "x86_64".

Quick Reference

The following items can be referred to as a quick "cheat-sheet" for development:

  • Install Go dependencies: go mod download or go get ./...
  • Run Go unit tests: task test
  • Ensure all Go and Terraform code is formatted properly: task fmt
  • Warm up your Go cache: task prebuild-lambda
    • We recommend running this command periodically, especially before compiling Go binaries, running tflocal plan, and/or tflocal apply.
  • Compile binary Lambda function handlers: task build
  • Compile the CLI tool: task build-cli
  • Run all QA checks normally executed during CI: task check
  • Initialize and deploy a test environment after starting LocalStack: task local:from-scratch

Contributing

This project wouldn’t exist without the hard work of many people! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md to find out how you can help.

Releasing to Production

Note: Releases are versioned using a YYYY.inc scheme that represents the year of the release, and the incremental release number for that year. You can view a list of all historical releases on the Releases page.

Maintainers with the requisite access may release to Production by performing the following steps:

  1. Navigate to the list of Releases for this repository.
  2. Locate the draft for the next release, and click the pencil icon to edit.
  3. Provide a high-level summary of the release in the Summary section of the release notes.
  4. Optionally, make any necessary edits to the other sections of the prepared release notes.
  5. Ensure "Set as a pre-release" is checked at the bottom of the edit page.
  6. Click the "Publish Release" button.

At this point, the release will be published (as a pre-release) and the deployment pipeline will automatically begin preparing the changes that will be rolled out to Production.

Once a Terraform plan has been created for the release, repository administrators will be notified for review and final approval. After the plan has been approved and applied to Production, the release will be automatically updated to remove the pre-release state, and a timestamp for the deployment will be appended to the release notes.