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You can kind of generally get a feel for when it's not working. I think people coming from an MVC background, you know, Rails and what not - you get used to the modularity, so you'll have code bases that are a million lines of code and you somehow figure out how to code in the modular space. But in the microservices wo... |
\[11:48\] A lot of the time, we're hacking out services in the space of one or two days and shipping them to production, at least when I was at Hailo, but I would say there is no right or wrong. I think for everyone it's a different thing and you really have to go with what works for you and that's what I like about th... |
I think when a team comes together, they kind of figure how they'll work and what number of services work for them and what code bases, what sizes of code bases work for them. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I agree. I think you have a very good point. I like that way of thinking. You might not even use it exclusively on your team, depending on how your team is made up, but you can definitely use it as a complement. |
**Asim Aslam:** Yeah. I think for me now the question I'm thinking more about is we've seen all this kind of stuff play out in organizations; what I wanna see is how this works in the open developer word. If we were to collaboratively build entire products with microservices just as general developers, would that work ... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's an interesting concept. I'd never thought of microservices outside of something that looks like an enterprise. |
**Asim Aslam:** So that's where I'm really going with this whole micro thing. I have done the organization thing for a long time; I think the tools that I build will be relevant to organizations, but at the same time I'm more interested in what we can collaboratively do as a developer community. GitHub's a great exampl... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So you're imagining this more like the Linux landscape, right? Where there are a lot of small tools that can be combined easily. Nobody kind of rewrites each of those pieces every time, right? |
**Asim Aslam:** Yeah, exactly. Like, when's the last time someone rewrote grep or ls or cat or something like that. It's like once they're built, they're built. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Now, I think that's an interesting thought. But how does that look from kind of the operations perspective? Who is responsible for all of those? Are these microservices that are running out somewhere that you leverage, or are these microservices that you're downloading these versions of and install... |
**Asim Aslam:** Say all of us here on the call, we were all collaborating on some project. Now, how will we do it? We're building a side project. A lot of the time people will go find some hosting and start running some stuff there. But what if we could string together our disparate Digital Ocean kind of resources, cre... |
I think it'd be kind of a shared responsibility between the people actually contributing to the network itself. I've built platform as a service for a very long time, so I think the part of automation really plays in and so you have to build self-healing automated systems that can kind of deal with this sort of failure... |
I mean, we're talking about distributed systems, right? So they have to be fault-tolerant. I think that kind of plays into it. It's really fun and kind of interesting when you get to a point where you bootstrap the platform and then everything is written as a service and even services that manage the infrastructure are... |
So I think you can kind of get to a place where no individual, no actual human being is managing any of it, it's actually completely automated. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[16:12\] You've got big dreams. |
**Asim Aslam:** I have very big dreams, but I also have the time to do it, the luxury of time, so that's quite nice. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So from a technical perspective one of the things I appreciate about the Micro framework is that you can interact with the framework. There are multiple different media, for example the Command Line tool, the bot, the API itself; designing that, what went into that? How did you design the services i... |
**Asim Aslam:** So I sort of cheated a little in that. At Hailo we had a lot of these things. We had the API that would convert HTTP to RPC, we had web applications as microservices, we had HUBOT and HipChat, which is where I kind of got the idea for the bot. And then we also had a shell or a CLI. I just took all those... |
When you're serving, public-facing the APIs, obviously everyone wants rasters or something similar in the feature, I think. I want everything to move to RPC and I think that's really the dream of gRPC as well. I think they're talking about mobile first in doing that, but it was just that it didn't all happen at once ei... |
That's the thing to remember with any of this kind of development - it's a slow, kind of progressive thing. You're not gonna have everything figured out, but it's also a layered architecture in the sense that you build exactly what you need at first and then rather than conflating that core thing, you build around it a... |
**Erik St. Martin:** And now backing up a little about what the framework actually is, I don't think we've actually kind of stepped through what the framework does, like what's it's abstracting from you... We talked about pluggable components, but we should probably take a second to talk about what those pieces are, es... |
**Asim Aslam:** Sure, that's a good point. Thanks for raising that. So I'll start with Micro - it's a toolkit that makes it easier to build managed microservices. At the core, there is this library called Go Micro, which is a pluggable RPC framework. The idea is that that core library provides you the fundamentals for ... |
So when you think about microservices, it's this service-oriented architecture kind of thing. What do I need there? I need some sort of communication; I need message and coding; communication might actually be synchronous and asynchronous. I need be able to serve requests, I need to be able to make requests. |
\[19:50\] Those things are really addressed at the core and nothing else. It only addresses those fundamentals, because the other things that you think about - off monitoring, distribute tracing and things like those - you don't necessarily need those to just build microservices. So that was really the focus of the cou... |
Then the kind of outer layer, the toolkit, as Brian mentioned, is the entry points. There's a CLI, an API, there's a web UI, there's a sidecar that provides an HTTP interface that has all the features of Go Micro, so if you want to write stuff not in Go, like if you wanna write in Python, Ruby, JavaScript whatever, you... |
It's similar to... Netflix has something called Prana which is their sidecar, Buoyant has something called Linkerd. These are kind of prominent, but the idea is really providing you with the fundamentals for actually writing microservices. I think many people are currently addressing that kind of runtime aspect. They'r... |
And I think there are very few tools actually around for that. |
I know Netflix has a very, very good suite of tools to do it in Java, but we were sort of missing these tools in Go. And credit to Peter Bourgon who a year or more ago started working on Go kit and around the same time I started work on Go Micro as well. So there's some tools now kind of surfacing to help with this, bu... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Okay, so that actually brings up a valid point and we have some people in the Slack channel who were kind of asking the same thing. How would you compare and contrast kind of Micro versus Go kit? Do you see them targeting different groups of people? The same? |
**Asim Aslam:** I think the community at large is the same, people who want write stuff with Go. But at the same time it's the thing that you have a preference to the way in which you're going to build applications. Everyone's going to look at libraries and services and things in Go... "Oh, I like this" or "I don't lik... |
The days of like "Should I pick MySQL or Postgres?" is the same kind of thing like "Should I pick this library or that one?" And I think Go kit, from what I see in the tagline, is a standard library for microservices or distributed systems. It's addressing quite a lot of various solid things and has huge kind of OSS co... |
From the Micro side, it's addressing the same kind of things, the fundamentals, but for me, I'm building based on my experiences. I'm building the tools that I didn't really see in the ecosystem, and I like very simple interfaces, I like a low barrier to entry. I don't want to care about the details when I'm actually w... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[23:53\] Yeah, and I think you bring up a valid point, too. Brian and I had kind of a similar situation at a prior employer that both of us worked at, the one we actually met at. So you have a lot of people who are interested in building these distributed frameworks and making the communication ha... |
**Asim Aslam:** You're dead on. When we built the platform at Hailo, the thing that everyone would say and the goal from the entire kind of platform team and those who were building this thing was, we don't want anyone to have to think about distributed systems. We want them to be able to leverage them, but we're build... |
And in the same way here, Micro - that's the goal. I don't want to have to care about all those details. Why should I? Like I just want to write software, I want to build my services. As I'm building this stuff, I'm thinking about, like, maybe even these things, some of these things are too low-level; maybe we need to ... |
At the moment it's the thing of when you're writing microservices code, you end up kind of focusing on "Well, I'm going to call this service and I'm going to call this service and I'm going to take this data and I'm going to transform it and return it", and at certain point you think, "Well, what I really care about is... |
If you think about what Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat did with MapReduce at Google in the early days, it's the same thing. It's like reducing the amount of work you have to do to get that data you really care about. So I think that's where we're going. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. So I've looked at the docs a couple of times. Unfortunately, I haven't actually built anything with Micro, but it seemed pretty inclusive. I like the idea that you could change out your messaging brokers, you could change out your service discovery mechanisms and these are all pain points. Ma... |
**Asim Aslam:** Yeah. I think that was totally the point. I think the first reason was when we built the stuff at Hailo, we kind of baked everything in because we were on a kind of a deadline. And then when we thought about open sourcing it, we realized that everything is kind of hard coded in a way that it makes it di... |
When I started to build this stuff, I knew that I wanted it to be pluggable, I wanted to minimize the number of dependencies that you needed to get started. And on your point, everyone has different skills, everyone likes different tools. I think it's important to be able to support that, while at the same time kind of... |
\[28:00\] And then in the future, in five years from now, when we're using a different kind of backend technologies, then you want to be able to swap those out as well. The worst thing is when you've kind of built all these things and you're dependent upon some service and then you have to go rewrite your code everywhe... |
I was really thoughtful about it, and hopefully, my hope is that other people kind of respond to this and they write plugins as well. So I hope to see some stuff contributed from the community. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So one of our listeners has a question and it almost relates to that. In terms of your plugins, how many of those can be used as components in other projects that maybe aren't even microservice related? Could you reuse the log package or service discovery or something like that in an unrelated proje... |
**Asim Aslam:** You could totally do that. They are all kind of independent packages, so each package can kind of be used independently. There's only the thing of kind of at the top level within Go Micro we have this reference to a service that combines everything, but for the most part, if you want to use the individu... |
I've actually seen some people kind of start to use pieces of the Go platform, which is the higher-level tooling. They're using the log package or the matrix package or the key value stuff. It's pretty cool. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Right. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Before we move on, I wanted to ask you, Asim, where can people find out more, how to get started, are there tutorials, where can they go to ask questions, do you have channel here on Gopher Slack? In other words, tell us how people can get started and get proficient using Micro? |
**Asim Aslam:** Sure, thanks for asking. You can go to the website micro.mu and that'll kind of take you to where you need to go. There's a blog which has the introduction, it has a getting started guide on how to write Go microservices. You can go to the GitHub repository and there's a Wiki and there's documents in ev... |
We also have a Slack channel dedicated to kind of Micro and microservices and distributed systems in general, so everyone can kind of self-invite and come join that and talk about this stuff. The reason I didn't actually set up one in the Gopher channel was because I knew that longer term, this wasn't going to be solel... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's great. |
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