[thorgaardian]

Looks just like that. As dstaten said, "just Promise.all but for microservices". I've been contributing to an open-source project called snappi.io - a microservice blueprint that includes very comparable dynamic RPC functionality. Combining RPC with standardized service contracts allows us to create and inject stubs for distributed systems as they get shipped out to solve the problems described in the article. Happy to see companies like Twitter following a similar path, and we're hoping to bring those patterns to more applications powered by a wide variety of tech-stacks.

[sandGorgon]

that's very interesting. Have you looked at linkerd.io (used in production at large kubernetes deployments)

[thorgaardian]

I have and personally I'm quite fond of it, but it doesn't quite go far enough imo. Linkerd is very lean and requires virtually zero knowledge of how the underlying service it manages works, but the knowledge of interface contracts for services is an important one.

Snappi introduces some mild requirements for how a service exposes it's functions, but once that is done the rest can be automated at deploy time. Not only can service-based load balancers be created dynamically, but RPC stubs can be created for each service and injected into peer services that are dependent on them. For example, if ServiceA needs to access ServiceB, it can do so by referencing this RPC stub knowing that the location of ServiceB will be injected at deploy time to ensure requests are fulfilled for the environment.

There are a number of benefits to this approach for a single application, but one of the larger benefits of consistent specs for contract creation is that individual services will be far easier to share. We're trying to create a structure that will not only empower us to re-use our own services, but also to consume services published by others by simply specifying them as a dependency.