services VS next-runtime

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.

I say "when it works" because it's not necessarily supported by all hosts. For example, Vercel of course supports it, but Netlify doesn't currently appear to. As for other hosts, you'd need to verify with them, but I'd imagine it varies.

View on GitHub

Note: at the time of writing this, there is a bug in Next (13.4.7). Although Next guarantees that you can use both app router and pages router in the same project, there is a bug that causes a full page reload when you browse from an app route to a pages route or vice versa. This is unfortunate but does not influence our tests.

So adding an edge function was the only workaround I found. Apparently it's an issue they're working on and I think it should be set as high priority since trailing slashes matter for SEO.

Here are a great guide on what to use when: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-plugin-nextjs/blob/main/docs/redirects-rewrites.md

It also seems like an unconscious acknowledgement that their add-on services (form handling, post-processing, identity, analytics, auth, etc.) are woefully inadequate in some cases and uncompetitive in others. $20/mo for form handling beyond 100 submissions? Okay, maybe. But the feature set is so bare it's laughable. There's minimal to no customization for notification emails, no confirmation emails, and their post-processing for form detection will bring the speed of your build pipeline to its knees on any serious site. On one site turning off post-processing yielded a build time reduction of more than double the actual build time of the site.

Not to mention the fact that by foregoing any concept of a server and forcing everything into some flavor of lambda they've created a scenario where every framework with any such functionality requires open source shepherding to function on their platform[0]. At best they've diluted their initial mission and at worst they've created an unmanageable mess. They can't even make Next.js work on their platform without causing what should issue 404s to return 500s instead[1]. The SEO implications for that are a potential death sentence and that issue has now been open for five months.

I was very optimistic about Netlify at the outset, and it worked great and still continues to work great for our test cases where we've deployed individual LPs. Where the pain seems to start is anything above a thousand pages or more, which is also coincidentally where the stakes start to get higher. I don't know how they could expect anyone at an enterprise or growing business to seriously scrutinize this platform and view it as ideal with that in mind.

[0]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-plugin-nextjs

I don't think Netlify supports WebP currently: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-plugin-nextjs/issues/687

I made the template here using NextJS, because Netlify has a NextJS plugin, which automates the process of using serverless functions. I inserted the call to my StepZen GraphQL endpoint in the pages/api folder to keep sensitive info off the client.