Decouple product list management from frontend

[NimJay]

Describe request or inquiry

• Today, modifying Online Boutique's list of products requires an update to the frontend.
• See previous change to list of products here.
• This is because the frontend hosts the images for all products (see /src/frontend/static/img/products folder).
• Ideally, we would not have to update the frontend.
• That is, product list management should be decoupled from frontend — in true microservice spirit.
• Potential solutions:
  1. have the productcatalogservice publicly host product images,
  2. introduce a new microservices for publicly hosting product images,
  3. have the productcatalogservice upload images to a public-hosting service like Google Cloud Storage (GCS). This approach would be similar to Avocano (another GCP demo application). Avocano uploads product images to GCS buckets and makes the backend share the URLs of those images with the frontend as needed.

What purpose/environment will this feature serve?

• This is part of a recent effort to make Online Boutique relate more to the ecommerce and retail industry.
• An important takeaway (for users from the ecommerce/retail industry) inside should be: how to decouple product and inventory management from the rest of the app.
• See Google-internal doc here for more info.

[minherz]

Any updates?