Micro is an open source project focused on simplifying microservices development.
It started life as go-micro - a Go framework for microservice development. But even
before then, go-micro, was a hacked up tiny library created to enable the development of a “kubernetes as a service”
project way back when in 2014 (see the first commit here).
For over 4 years Consul has served us well as one of the default service discovery systems in Micro. It was
in fact in the very beginning the default mechanism used for the registry and the only underlying
dependency required to get started.
Something I often wonder is how we’re stuck in this pre-historic phase of software development. Where technology has largely advanced from a consumer experience standpoint, but as developers it feels like we’re moving at a snails pace.
Micro started it’s journey as go-micro - a microservices framework - focused
on providing the core requirements for microservice development. It creates a simpler experience for building microservices
by abstracting away the complexity of distributed systems.
Over the past 4 years we’ve focused on creating the simplest experience for microservice development. To do this
we built a strongly opinionated open source framework called Go Micro and
Micro, a microservice toolkit built to explore, query and
interact with those services via an API Gateway, CLI, Slack and Web Dashboard.
Today we’re announcing support for Connect-Native Go Micro services via a slim initialisation library called Go Proxy.
This will provide Go Micro with the ability to do authorized and secure service-to-service communication.
Hey, we’re starting a newsletter! Micro provides an opinionated view on how to build cloud-native systems but we want to provide
opinions beyond the micro ecosystem too.
Application configuration has remained largely static for most of our lifetime, using flags, environment variables and files.
Any change has usually required restarting the application or significant complexity in code to signal and reload the config.
The open source development of micro can now be sponsored via Patreon. Before we
go into the details, I want to first mention what micro is and it’s funding journey.
As technology evolves so do our programming models. We’ve gone from monoliths to microservices
and more recently started to push this separation even further towards functions.
2016 has been a heck of a year for Micro. In this post we’ll recap on the past year and where we’re going but to begin with let’s talk
about Micro’s origin.
Last night I spoke about Micro at the Go meetup in London. Thanks to everyone that came to the meetup, the organisers
and all those that asked questions.
It’s been a little while since the last blog post but we’ve been hard at work on Micro and it’s definitely starting
to pay off. Let’s dive into it all now!