By using GitHub intelligently, you can dynamically populate your server with Micro Services through a UI, arguably resulting in an AppStore for your server

We’ve had apt-get, AppStore, NuGet and npm packages for a long time, and imagining life without these repositories might be difficult for developers and users. However, I don’t think the world has ever seen anything allowing you to automatically install Micro Services into your server through similar mechanisms. If you think about micro services as much as I have done though, such a feature might become incredibly useful. For instance, micro services are typically created such that they can be horizontally scaled, allowing you to distribute them to multiple servers, for then to create some sort of host that consumes them all. In many ways, this is arguably the whole point about micro services. This allows you to setup one development machine, and/or development environment, where you deploy all your micro services - While in production you use the scalability features to distribute these same micro services unto dozens of different servers - For then to change configuration settings, allowing your host app to use configurations informing it where to physically find these micro services. Basically resulting in that adding micro services to your particular server resembles the act of installing apps on your iPhone.

The way the above actually works, is through publishing an “app manifest” on GitHub. You can see mine  here. This manifest contains a link to the zip files containing the latest release of any particular micro service module. I’ve only got three for now, but I’ll create more of these over time.

• Babel
• BabelFish
• BabelMail

#micro services #github