UC’s Amazing Story of Microservices
10x Engineering Series – Microservices
This is the introductory blog to the “10x Engineering Series – Microservices”.
We at Urban Company are very proud of our platforms. The speed of adopting a tech change, the standardisation, the leverage – all makes for a unique ecosystem that fosters excellence.
The one piece of our engineering legacy is our Microservices platform. Before we jump into it, let me throw a few interesting anecdotes to demonstrate how easy it gets for an engineer.
Zero Boilerplate Code? That's right. We might just be a company with the leanest microservices. Our services simply implement functions that return a Promise. That is automatically converted into a fully functioning microservice with all the bells and whistles needed as a mature tech company.
Services & Scripts Sharing Code? Scripts never get the same importance as a microservice. A large reason is because they are a lot of work – a different stack, lack of testing, no sharing of code base, etc. We seemed to have skipped these, since our scripts and services can share their code without any extra work.
Monitoring & Alerting By Default? Monitoring a service is easy. Making it useful and easily accessible is hard. With a single line, all our services get their monitoring, tracking and alerting setup in place. A single consolidated place to go to, a variety of metrics to monitor, helpful segments & traces to debug, and a unified alerting process to bring all this to your doorstep!
How Is This All Possible?
The secret behind all the above lies in our journey of platforms. We will take your through this journey through a series of blogs.
1. The Secret to our 10x Engineering – Culture & Leadership
This blog takes you through the most essential part – our core DNA and leadership. We hope it inspires you towards “platform” thinking early and decisively. (link)
2. The Foundation Stone – Just 2 Steps
All that is needed to create an amazing platform for microservices are two simple steps. Do them first, do them quickly and it will unlock a whole world of leverage. We will have a blog for each of these.
3. The Amazing Benefits – Success Stories
Just doing the above early creates standardisation across all teams / services, and creates a base that is easy to extend. The basics of any microservices platform are:
. How to communicate between microservices?
. How to monitor & observe a service?
. How to do events pubsub?
. How to write scripts?
. How to manage multiple environments?
. How to do CICD?
Instead of talking about the basics, we will take a few examples that will hopefully WOW you.
In summary, the microservices is just one example. The real magic of compounding sits in our ability to reason out and build the right platforms.
“The real gift is in our engineering DNA — to care immensely about the future, about maintainability, about compounding benefits. This DNA and culture is what allows us to create true leverage. The RPC framework is just one of the examples, perhaps our first bold one.”
Next >> UC’s Secret to 10x Engineering
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You can read up more about us on our publications —
https://medium.com/uc-design
https://medium.com/uc-engineering
https://medium.com/uc-culture
https://www.urbancompany.com/blog/humans-of-urban-company/
If you are interested in finding out about opportunities, visit us at http://careers.urbancompany.com
