Server

The micro server is a distributed systems runtime for the cloud and beyond.

Overview

The Micro Server is a distributed systems runtime or also known as a cloud services operating system. The server builds on the Go Micro framework, providing service level abstractions of the interfaces as RPC. The server started as a toolkit for entrypoints such as CLI, API Gateway and Web dashboard. It’s since evolved into a full operating environment for microservices which abstracts away the complexity of the underlying infrastructure.

Design

The server starts as a single binary called micro available at github.com/micro/micro. It takes every Go Micro interface and provides it as a service with RPC endpoints equivalent to the interface. These RPC services then leverage the Go Micro interfaces internally making them entirely pluggable. So creating a runtime agnostic operating system and anti-corruption layer that forms the basis of a platform.

Services included:

• CLI - a standard command line interface for the terminal
• API - external api gateway serving http/json and sending internal RPC
• Web - Web dashboard that provides a proxy for serving web apps as microservices
• Proxy - service to service gRPC proxy encapsulating the go-micro client/server
• Bot - A Slack bot for ChatOps with all the same commands as the CLI
• Runtime - Service deployment
• Registry - Service discovery
• Broker - Asynchronous pubsub messaging
• Proxy - Service to service proxy for gRPC communication
• Store - Distributed key-value storage
• Debug - Stats, logs and tracing for debugging
• Auth - User and service authentication and authorization
• Config - Dynamic configuration service

TODO

Open source related requirements

• Micro as a server
• Code generated gRPC clients
• Clean idiomatic libraries wrapping the gRPC clients
• Angular based web templates
• API service interface and code generation