Getting started with Phoesion Glow, the backend service development solution for human beings
Tags: dotnet, devops, cloud, backend
Published: 2024-06-05 09:25:53

[Phoesion Glow](https://glow.phoesion.com) is a cloud-native framework designed for dotnet (micro-)services with features like service-bus, load-balancing, scaling, logging/tracing, monitoring and cluster management, service-to-service discovery/communication and more. It also includes a lot of GUI/CLI developer tools (eg. aspire-like dashboards) and build-in Distributed application services like persistent key-value storage (caching), Mutexes, Job-Scheduling, State-Machines, FeatureFlags etc.

  

**To get started without installing ANY tools, you can give it as quick try using docker containers, by :**

1. [Downloading the "hello world" sample code](https://files.phoesion.com/Samples/HelloWorldSample.zip)
2. Start the Reactor service container using : ```sh
docker run --name reactor-2.x -d -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -p 15000-15010:15000-15010 -p 16000:16000 phoesion/phoesion.glow.reactor-dev
```
3. Run the sample (using Visual Studio)
4. Open [http://localhost/HelloWorld/Greeter/SayHello](http://localhost/HelloWorld/Greeter/SayHello) and you should see a "Hello World" response.

  

**What happened behind the scenes to produce that response?**

The ingress/mediator service *(running in container)* received the http request and, using the service-bus *(also in container)*, made an RPC call to your service *(running in visual studio)*, that handled it and returned the response. All this happened automatically, without needing to configure any of them! and it's because all components were build from the ground-up to work together as part of a complete (opinionated) solution

  

**To get the full developer experience, including developer dashboard, i recommend installing the tools:**

1. Stop/Delete the reactor container from docker *(it will not be needed anymore)*
2. Close Visual Studio *(so new templates can be installed)*
3. [Download and install the tools (Blaze)](https://glow-docs.phoesion.com/downloads/Downloads_Blaze.html?tabs=oses-1)

Now, open up the sample code again in Visual Studio and run the service. The **developer dashboard** will pop-up giving your visibility to you service metrics, structured logging, tracing and more. Your are now fully setup to start developing services using Phoesion Glow!

There a lot of [samples demonstrating the capabilities of Glow](https://github.com/Phoesion/Glow-Samples), have a look and try them out!

  

**Some notable samples include :**

* [1\_REST](https://github.com/Phoesion/Glow-Samples/tree/master/1_REST) : a lot of examples for creating your web APIs
* [2\_Interop ](https://github.com/Phoesion/Glow-Samples/tree/master/2_Interop): service to service communication.
* [10\_AspHosting ](https://github.com/Phoesion/Glow-Samples/tree/master/10_AspHosting): running ASP services in Glow
* [0b\_Logging ](https://github.com/Phoesion/Glow-Samples/tree/master/0b_Logging): structured logging sample
* [27\_\* - 31\_\* (AppXXX services)](https://github.com/Phoesion/Glow-Samples/tree/master/30_AppJobs) : distributed application services like job scheduling, state machines, mutexes and caches.

If you find it interesting and would like to know more information and how to run/deploy your services in your cloud or on-premises let me know.

  

## Screenshots
_This is a screenshot of the developer dashboard_

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4ix9dr237rnqt1n7iqdf.png)


_This is a screenshot of Blaze, the service cluster management dashboard_

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/5f3r3kkctvdylgbnkstr.png)