Type-Safe Infrastructure: Pioneering Simplicity and Stability
Tags: programming, typesafe, go, typescript
Published: 2023-11-01 10:12:09

Most developers are by now familiar with the concept of type-safety in programming. It brings benefits like increasing predictability, reducing bugs, and helping ensure your application behaves as expected.

🤔 **But have you ever considered applying type-safety to your infrastructure?**
This innovation allows developers to integrate infrastructure components, such as databases or pub/sub, as safely-typed objects within the application.

💪 **The results?**
Streamlined development, early error detection, and a smoother deployment process. Let's dive into the practical benefits of type-safe infrastructure and how you can get started using it.

## ✨ Type-Safe Infrastructure: The Upside
Type-safe infrastructure helps to unify your application's code and its infrastructure layer, to provide several compelling advantages:

- **Faster iterations:** With type-safe infrastructure, you can identify infrastructure problems as early as in your code editor, instead of learning about issues via the — much slower — deployment cycle.
- **Fewer Mistakes:** By catching infrastructure earlier, you can drastically reduce post-deployment issues that affect users.
- **Easier Workflow:** Developing for the cloud is normally cumbersome and requires many manual steps to ensure you have a local environment or test environment that matches production. By making infrastructure a type-safe part of your code, it's possible to use [tools](https://encore.dev) to automatically provide production-like local infrastructure for development and testing.

## 🔬 Practical Example: The Pub/Sub Model

Take the widely-used Pub/Sub (publish-subscribe) model as an example — commonly used to create event-driven applications. 

Normally, Pub/Sub mechanisms are blind to the data structures of the messages they handle. This is a common source of hard-to-catch errors that can be a nightmare to debug.

**With type-safe infrastructure, there's a real paradigm shift.** You can now achieve end-to-end type-safety from the moment of publishing a message, right through to delivery. This not only eliminates those annoying hard-to-debug errors but also translates to major time savings for us developers.

## 🙋‍♂️ Getting Started with Type-Safe Infrastructure

At [Encore](https://encore.dev) we're pioneering the concept of type-safe infrastructure, and have created an [Open Source Infrastructure SDK](https://encore.dev/docs/primitives/) that makes adopting this new concept a smooth experience for developers.

With the SDK, you can start declaring infrastructure components as type-safe objects as part of your code. It's currently available for Go (Golang), and TypeScript is just about to launch (December 2023). (👉 Join [Slack](https://encore.dev/slack) to get in the TypeScript Beta.)

### 👉 Benefits of using Encore for Type-Safe Infrastructure

Aside from getting end-to-end type-safety, Encore's Backend Development Platform comes with several other perks:

- Auto-generation of microservices boilerplate.
- Automated local environment setup with [local developer dashboard](https://encore.dev/docs/observability/dev-dash) and automated testing on dedicated local infra.
- Automated cloud deployments to your AWS or GCP account.
- Built-in tooling: Encore automatically hooks up your app with distributed tracing, provides key metrics, automatically generates your API docs, and more.

### 🕹 Getting Started

For developers eager to try out the simple workflow that type-safe infrastructure enables, check out this tutorial for [building a REST API with a PostgreSQL database](https://encore.dev/docs/tutorials/rest-api).👈 It will show you the fundamentals of the type-safe infrastructure workflow.

To figure out how to use Encore for your current project, [join the developer community on Slack](https://encore.dev/slack) for guidance, or check out the [docs](https://encore.dev/docs/how-to/try-encore).

## Wrapping up

Type-safe infrastructure is the next logical step in cloud-native backend development. Most of the cumbersome work of building distributed systems dependent on cloud services can now be automated. It's time to embrace the future and evolve!