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We’re happy to announce the release of Micro and Go Micro v2! This release is a major milestone for us as we adopt gRPC and embedded NATS by default.

Over the past 6 months we at Micro have been hard at work developing a global service network to build, share and collaborate on microservices.

Micro is an open source project focused on simplifying microservices development. It started life as go-micro - a Go framework for microservice development. But even before then, go-micro, was a hacked up tiny library created to enable the development of a “kubernetes as a service” project way back when in 2014 (see the first commit here).

For over 4 years Consul has served us well as one of the default service discovery systems in Micro. It was in fact in the very beginning the default mechanism used for the registry and the only underlying dependency required to get started.

Something I often wonder is how we’re stuck in this pre-historic phase of software development. Where technology has largely advanced from a consumer experience standpoint, but as developers it feels like we’re moving at a snails pace.

Micro started it’s journey as go-micro - a microservices framework - focused on providing the core requirements for microservice development. It creates a simpler experience for building microservices by abstracting away the complexity of distributed systems.

Over the past 4 years we’ve focused on creating the simplest experience for microservice development. To do this we built a strongly opinionated open source framework called Go Micro and Micro, a microservice toolkit built to explore, query and interact with those services via an API Gateway, CLI, Slack and Web Dashboard.

Today we’re announcing support for Connect-Native Go Micro services via a slim initialisation library called Go Proxy. This will provide Go Micro with the ability to do authorized and secure service-to-service communication.

Hey, we’re starting a newsletter! Micro provides an opinionated view on how to build cloud-native systems but we want to provide opinions beyond the micro ecosystem too.

Application configuration has remained largely static for most of our lifetime, using flags, environment variables and files. Any change has usually required restarting the application or significant complexity in code to signal and reload the config.

The open source development of micro can now be sponsored via Patreon. Before we go into the details, I want to first mention what micro is and it’s funding journey.

As technology evolves so do our programming models. We’ve gone from monoliths to microservices and more recently started to push this separation even further towards functions.

Today I’m excited to announce the Micro Explorer, a single place to find projects within the micro ecosystem.

2016 has been a heck of a year for Micro. In this post we’ll recap on the past year and where we’re going but to begin with let’s talk about Micro’s origin.

As a change of pace, this post will mostly be a high level discussion on the non-technical aspects of adopting microservices within a company.