Micro
Introduction
This is a high level introduction to Micro
Contents
About
Micro is a platform for API service development. It addresses the key requirements for building services in the cloud. Micro leverages the microservices architecture pattern and provides a set of services which act as the building blocks of a platform. Micro deals with the complexity of distributed systems and provides simpler programmable abstractions to build on.
Goals
Micro’s goal is to abstract away the complexity of building services for the Cloud. The cloud itself went through a boom with managed compute and infrastructure emerging from the likes of AWS. It’s taken what was an operational burden and turned it into a suite of fully managed services accessed via APIs. But now building services in the cloud has become more complicated than before. Micro looks to ease some of that pain through a single platform as a service like approach.
Features
Below are the core components that make up Micro.
Server
Micro is built as a microservices architecture and abstracts away the complexity of the underlying infrastructure. We compose this as a single logical server to the user but decompose that into the various building block primitives that can be plugged into any underlying system.
The server is composed of the following services.
- API - HTTP Gateway which dynamically maps http/json requests to RPC using path based resolution
- Auth - Authentication and authorization out of the box using jwt tokens and rule based access control.
- Broker - Ephemeral pubsub messaging for asynchronous communication and distributing notifications
- Config - Dynamic configuration and secrets management for service level config without the need to restart
- Events - Event streaming with ordered messaging, replay from offsets and persistent storage
- Network - Inter-service networking, isolation and routing plane for all internal request traffic
- Proxy - An identity aware proxy used for remote access and any external grpc request traffic
- Runtime - Service lifecycle and process management with support for source to running auto build
- Registry - Centralised service discovery and API endpoint explorer with feature rich metadata
- Store - Key-Value storage with TTL expiry and persistent crud to keep microservices stateless
Go SDK
Micro includes a Go SDK for service development. The Go SDK makes it drop dead simple to write your services without having to piece together lines and lines of boilerplate. Auto configured and initialised by default, just import and get started quickly.
Command Line
Micro brings not only a rich architectural model but a command line experience tailored for that need. The command line interface includes dynamic command mapping for all services running on the platform. Turns any service instantly into a CLI command along with flag parsing for inputs. Includes support for multiple environments and namespaces, automatic refreshing of auth credentials, creating and running services, status info and log streaming, plus much, much more.
Web Dashboard
Explore, discover and consume services via the browser using Micro Web. The dashboard makes use of your env configuration to locate the server and provides dynamic form fill for services.
Remote Environments
Finally Micro bakes in the concept of Environments and multi-tenancy through Namespaces. Run your server locally for
development and in the cloud for staging and production, seamlessly switch between them using the CLI commands micro env set [environment]
and micro user set [namespace].
Service Development
Micro focuses on the microservices development model, which takes from the unix philosophy of writing tools that do one thing well. We think the domain boundary you’ve come to know at the database table level in Rails monolithic web apps moves to service boundaries at the network and naming layer.
For example a blog app might consist of posts, comments, tags and so on as tables in a Rails app, but in Micro these would be defined as independent services. These as Micro services which do one thing well and communicate over the network or via pubsub messaging where necessary.
Micro is built with this Service development model in mind which is why the underlying platform defines the primitives required to write those along with accessing them from external means. Micro includes a Go service framework that makes it super simple to get started fast.
API First
We think the definition of a Micro Service is one that helps you build the next Twilio or Stripe. Micro services are looking more and more like something built to be consumed entirely as an API. So Micro builds with that model in mind. You write Micro services on the backend and stitch them together as a single API for the frontend.
Micro provides an API gateway that handles HTTP/JSON requests externally and converts them to gRPC for the backend. This massively simplifies the experience of building efficient highly performant services on the backend which are decoupled from each other but presenting a single view to the consumers.
Multi Cloud
Micro was built with the knowledge that not only do we exist in a multi-environment model but one that’s cloud first. Because of that we build in a gRPC identity proxy for CLI and local services that enables you to remotely connect to any Micro server securely and access those services and resources with your credentials stored in the Auth service.
You can assume not only are your services built for a Cloud first era but that your access to them is in that manner also.
Getting Started
Head to the getting started guide to start writing Micro services now.