Micro
10 years of Micro
10 years of Micro. Wow. What a journey it’s been.
When I started Micro, it wasn’t even Micro, it was something called myODC (my own datacenter), which was really the beginnings of the idea of building a platform for microservices. At the time (circa Nov 2014) we were playing around with doing kubernetes as a service or some sort of multi-language playground using containers and coding gists in a web UI which were injected into them. The idea for micro or more specifically go-micro was actually a framework I was writing internally to make it easier to write the services in a microservices way.
Little did I know that would become the starting point for everything.
Go Micro spun out of all that and in January 2015 was open sourced after only 6 weeks of real work. While the first commit was somewhere on bitbucket from back in October 2014, it wasn’t until the ideas for myODC failed that Go Micro was born. Everything after that in relation to Micro was inspiration from the company called Hailo that I had been working at during that time.
Hailo had built an incredible tech platform called H2O. I was part of the platform team and got to play a small role in that. But what I learned from that was the power of a standardised platform for the development of APIs, services and web applications. Something akin to what Amazon had done, Netflix and Google. And then in more recent years, Uber, Monzo, etc. All inspired by the idea of services and APIs being the foundation of a platform.
As I reflect on the 10 years of Micro, it dawns on me that the goal should never have been to create the platform itself but actually the services that would be offered to end consumers via apps and APIs. Unfortunately that realisation came too late and we never got to attempt that part of the vision. Essentially Micro went through a number of phases; an open source project, a bootstrapped consultancy, a VC funded company and eventually a defunct startup with a founder struggling to let go. I think if I was to do it again I’d start building high level services from day 1 like a blog, chat, mail, etc. But that time has passed. Today we need to take stock of what’s still here and try to enable the community to use the tools we still have. For all my attempts to kill Go Micro, it’s still here, with 22k stars on Github, people still find it useful and so we should help those people. In an ideal world I’d like to still write some high level services, get paid to do this work, but we’ll see how that goes.
I’m grateful for the opportunity I had, hopefully people found the tools useful, and we managed to employ some people along the way.
Let’s see what the next 10 years brings.
Cheers Asim