network VS services

So funny you say this. I think it's the insight of many developers including my own. I hacked together a framework that did this before the existence of GRPC. Now I'm trying to formalise it as a protocol. https://github.com/micro/network/blob/main/PROTOCOL.md

Alright, let me throw my hat into this ring with a totally unfinished idea. I started working on a design for something called the Micro Communication Protocol (MUCP) [1]. It's a header based protocol that's transport agnostic and focuses on service-to-service communication. An early prototype existed in Micro [2] but I'm primarily focused on redesigning the protocol before re-implementing it. Micro was geared towards API first services but I'm looking to expand the scope and try to build a UI layer on top. Most of the protocols focused very much on communication between people but I think if you focus on service-to-service communication more broadly it opens up the avenue to all sorts of multiplayer collaboration.

- [1] https://github.com/micro/network/blob/main/PROTOCOL.md

Yea like you're part of this club that has exclusive access to something, you contribute to it, deliver value, see it grow and then it's gone when you leave. It exists within a silo and for the better part of a decade that's really irked me but I haven't quite figured out how to solve for that problem beyond doing it in a shared open source repo and a shared platform. I think I the issue is it's bigger than any one person and you have to find a way to sell thousands of people on the idea. My starting point was code and now I wonder could I have approached this differently? Is there another path in which this would actually succeed? I'm still trying to figure it out and it's driving me crazy. Next I'll be writing a protocol no joke https://github.com/micro/network

We used Micro to build and offer Micro services on M3O. Every API to you see there is powered by the open source equivalent Micro service here https://github.com/micro/services

I will make a note here https://github.com/micro/services/issues/262

I shared this post in a few developer communities like Hacker News and it was well received. Over the past few years I've been working on an open source project called Micro, an API first development platform and I'm now sharing Micro Services, a catalog of reusable real world Micro services.

Thanks, that made now more sense. I'd put this condensed together with https://micro.dev/blog/2022/09/27/real-world-micro-services.... more prominently to the readme of https://github.com/micro/services ! Looking at that github alone makes it hard to commect the context.

Thanks for the comments and questions. I'll do my best to answer them.

> Are things hosted on some other cloud provider, if so where? What region?

Our core platform is currently hosted on DigitalOcean in the London region. That will expand to multiple regions and multiple providers over time. We did start that way many years ago but with a small team it's hard to manage.

> What about uptime? If I end up building an application with all of these APIs, I do need a bit more confidence that things will be stable.

We want to be able to provide uptime guarantees in the near future. Right now I'll say based on our experience running it in the past 9-12 months it's feeling like four 9s verging on 5 but I don't want to jinx us. We are dependent on our providers but we're also people who have managed platforms for many years.

> the crypto endpoint looks interesting, but for me, it would be quite crucial to know where the data is from? How often is it updated?

Our crypto APIs are currently powered Finage.co.uk. We do some level of caching on our side but only for 5-10 mins. I'll try add some details around that in the overview. You can see the source at https://github.com/micro/services

We're playing in this space with M3O (https://m3o.com) but focused very much on making APIs programmable as opposed to completely doing away with the code.