exosphere-sdk

ex·o·sphere (ˈeksōˌsfir) - the outermost region of a planet's atmosphere (aka, above the clouds)

easy and fun micro-services

A high-level devops framework that allows teams of various skill levels to work on composite applications with unparalleled productivity and joy.

Composite applications are the opposite of monolithic applications - they consist of a number of individual code bases. Exosphere allows to perform typical devops operations on such application using simple, reliable commands:

• clone a composite application consisting of code located in a variety of repositories onto your machine
• add more services to your application - either a fully functioning empty service including tests from templates, or an existing third-party service from an external repository or DockerHub image
• run the application on your machine. Exosphere boots up all services and their dependencies within Docker images, so no installation of programming languages or runtimes is necessary. It is built on top of Docker Compose and adds missing features on top of it. For example waiting until dependencies are fully booted up before starting the application services. Or restarting individual Docker images as their content gets modified by the developer
• test all the services of the application, as well as the application as a whole. This includes functional, performance^*, and security tests^*.
• update all the third-party application parts to their latest version
• deploy your application to public or private cloud environments including AWS and others^* using Terraform.

Benefits

Microservices hold great promises for taking software development and devops to the next level, comparable to biological life evolving from simple single-cellular to higher-level multi-cellular forms. Moving from a single code base to composite applications consisting of dozens to hundreds of indvidiual code bases also makes a lot of things more complicated and repetitive. For example, now you have to:

• download dozens/hundreds of code bases onto your machine and prepare them, for example by installing modules or compiling them
• if you have a polyglot application, install dozens of runtimes or compilers for the different code bases, sometimes in conflicting versions that are not trivial to install and operate in parallel on the same machine.
• install dozens of dependencies: microservice applications not only break up monolithic code bases, but also monolithic databases. An application might require a dozen database engines to run. Installing and configuring them is tedious, boring, and brittle.
• deploying applications now means testing, dockerizing, uploading, deploying, and configuring hundreds of individual code and data bases. Upgrading means doing this only with a subset of services that has to be determined, listed, and then executed on.

There are good tools for many of these tasks, but they don't know about each other and don't work together. Many of them also lack features. As a result, projects currently often duct-tape a variety of tools together, each one in their own ways. Everybody on the team has to install, configure, and learn to use complicated ops tools before being able to get the application running and contribute code.

Exosphere provides a systematic, robust, and easy to use solution to these issues. It enables teams with a variety of skill levels, from principal engineers to interns, to work efficiently on composite applications, getting devops activities done with a single command-line call, and without having to learn to install, configure, and use a whole array of ops tools and learn how exactly they are duct-taped together on each project.

Benefits for tech leads

As a tech lead, you can make your knowledge and expertise available in the form of a tool that you configure, so that the rest of your team can follow your way without you having to be around and supervise everything yourself. You can focus on the next big question instead of being busy keeping the project running.

Benefits for developers

As a developer, you can get started working on the project within minutes, and everything works. Instead of having to read extensive project documentation that explains what exact set of ops and infrastructure tools and other boilerplate that are not part of your business logic, but are merely there to help deal with complexity. are used on this particular project, in what particular way, and having to install and learn to use them,

Benefits for Ops

Exosphere makes Ops easier in several ways:

• Exosphere provides infrastructure that enforces dedicated functional, performance, reliability, and security goals for code, against which developers have to build their code against right from the start. This means the product will run better and more reliable in production, because these things are no longer afterthoughts.
• issues encountered in production, for example a performance or security regression, can be modeled as new restrictions and goals which are enforced to the developers by their toolchain. This means they will be addressed, and keep being addressed, from now on.
• the code you operate comes with a lot of devops tool-chain attached to it, which makes it easier to set up CI and CD
• Exosphere has built-in support to set up and deploy to various environments, for example development, qa, staging, production

Business benefits

Saving your engineers from the need to deal with custom, duct-taped together low-level ops tools provides a number of benefits from a business perspective:

• the ramp-up time for new engineers on the project is radically reduced, sometimes from weeks to minutes.
• you can utilize a wider variety of skill levels on the project. For example, with Exosphere it becomes so trivial to run even complex applications that even non-technical people like designers or product managers can run the application on their machine.
• your tech lead is less busy keeping the project in the air, and can focus on more strategic questions

Get Started

• learn more about the configuration files
• install the SDK
• download and run an example application
• build your own application by following the tutorial

Reference

• the scaffolding commands
• platform developer documentation

Further Reading

• related projects: LeverOS

^* coming soon

Changelog

0.22.1 (2017-06-08)

Bug fixes

• fix nats application dependency