Micro 3.0 (M3O) is a platform for cloud native development
Tags: go, cloud
Published: 2020-11-10 18:44:18

---
title: Micro 3.0 (M3O) is a platform for cloud native development
published: true
description: New release of Micro, a platform for microservices development
tags: golang, cloud
---

This is the official announcement for the release of Micro 3.0 better known as M3O - a platform for cloud native development. 
Our 3.0 release is a major refactor and consolidation of the existing tooling into something that addresses the entire workflow of build, run, manage and consume all from the developers perspective.

Read on to learn more or go straight to the [latest release](https://github.com/micro/micro/releases/latest). Head to [m3o.com](https://m3o.com) for the hosted offering.

## Overview

Micro focuses on developer productivity for the backend. It's clear that the Cloud has become infinitely more complex over the past few years. Micro attempts to create order out of that chaos by distilling it all down to a handful of primitives for distributed systems development.

Why should you care? If you're reading this you've no doubt encountered the tedious nature of infrastructure management, 
wrangling a kubernetes cluster on AWS or the thousands of things you need to do to cobble together a platform before 
starting to build a product. We think we've nailed the solution for that just as Android did for Mobile. Keep reading 
if you want to find out more.

## Quick Flashback

Micro started out as a [toolkit for microservices](/blog/2016/03/20/micro.html) development, 
incorporating an api gateway, web dashboard and cli to interact with services built using a Go RPC framework. 
Back then it felt like getting anyone to buy into PaaS again was going to be a losing battle. So we chose to write single purpose tools around an RPC framework thinking it might allow people to adopt it piece by piece until they saw the need for a platform. It was really straight forward right until it wasn't. 

There was a simple Go framework plus some surrounding 
components to query and interact with them, but like any long lived project, the complexity grew as we tried to solve for that platform experience that just couldn't be done with a swiss army knife. The repo exploded with a number of independent libraries. To the creator its obvious what these are all for but to the user there is nothing but cognitive overload. 

In 2019 we went through a [consolidation](/blog/2019/06/10/the-great-consolidation.html) of all those libraries which helped tremendously but there was still always one outstanding question. What's the difference between 
[micro](https://github.com/micro/micro) and [go-micro](https://github.com/micro/go-micro)? It's a good question and one we've covered before. We saw go-micro as a framework and micro as a toolkit but these words were basically empty and meaningless because multiple projects working in coordination really need a crisp story that makes sense and we didn't have one.

In 2020 we're looking to rectify that but let's first let's talk about platforms.

## PaaS in 2020

5 years ago the world exploded with a proliferation of "cloud native" tooling as containers and container orchestration took centre stage. More specifically, Docker and Kubernetes redefined the technology landscape along with a more conscious move towards building software in the cloud.

Micro took a forward looking view even as far back as 2015. It was clear distributed systems and cloud native was going to become the dominant model for backend services development over the coming years but, what wasn't clear is just how long we'd spend wrangling all sorts tools like docker, kubernetes, grpc, istio and everything else. It felt like we were rebuilding the stack and weren't really ready to talk about development aspects of it all.

In fact at that time, people mostly wanted to kick the tyres on all these tools and piece something together. 
Running kubernetes yourself became all the rage and even using service mesh as the holy grail for solving all your distributed systems problems. Many of us have come to realise while all of this tech is fun it's not actually solving development problems.  

We've gotten to the point of managed kubernetes and even things like Google Cloud Run or DigitalOcean App Platform, but none of these things are helping with a development model for a cloud native era. Our frustrations with the existing developer experience have grown and Micro felt like something that could solve for all that, but only if we took a drastic step to overhaul it.

We think PaaS 3.0 is not just about running your container or even your source code but something that encapsulates the entire developer experience including a model for writing code for the cloud. Based on that Micro 3.0 aka M3O is a platform for cloud native development.

## What even is Cloud Native?

What is cloud native? What does it mean to build for the cloud? What is a cloud service?

Cloud native is basically a descriptive term for something that was built to run in the cloud. That's it. It's not 
magic, it might sound like a buzzword, but the reality is it simply means, that piece of software was built to run in the cloud. How does that differ from the way we used to build before? Well the idea behind the cloud is that its ephemeral, scalable and everything can be accessed via an API.

Our expectation for services running in the cloud is that they're mostly stateless, leveraging external services 
for the persistence, that they are identified by name rather than IP address and they themselves provide an API that can be consumed by multiple clients such as web, mobile and cli or other services. 

Cloud native applications are horizontally scalable and operate within domain boundaries that divide them as 
separate apps which communicate over the network via their APIs rather than as one monolithic entity. We think cloud services require a fundamentally different approach to software creation and why Micro 3.0 was designed with this in mind.

## Micro 3.0 aka M3O

Micro 3.0 (M3O) reimagines Micro as a platform for cloud native development. What does that mean? Well we think of 
it as PaaS 3.0, a complete solution for source to running and beyond. Micro has moved from just being a Go framework to incorporating a standalone server and hosted platform. Our hosted offering is called [M3O](https://m3o.com), a hat tip to Micro 3.0 or M[icr]o, whichever way you want to see it. 

Another way to think about it. What Git is to GitHub, Micro is to the M3O platform. Let's dig into it.

Micro 3.0 includes the following.

### Server

The server is our abstraction for cloud infrastructure and underlying systems you might need for writing 
distributed systems. The server encapsulates all of these concerns as gRPC services which you can query via any language. The goal here is to say developers don't really need to be thinking about infrastructure but what they do need is design patterns and primitives for building distributed systems. 

<img src="/images/micro-3.0.png" />

The server includes the following:

- **Authentication**: Auth whether its authentication or authorization is part of the system. Create JWT tokens, define access rules, use one system to govern everything in a simple and straight forward manner. Whether it’s for a user or a service.

- **Configuration**: Dynamic config management allows you to store relevant config that needs to be updated without having to restart services. Throw API keys and business logic related configuration into the secure config service and let your services pick up the changes.

- **Key-Value Storage**: We’re focused on best practices for microservices development which means keeping services mostly stateless. To do this we’re providing persistent storage on the platform. Key-Value allows you to rapidly write code and store data in the format you care about.

- **Event Streaming**: Distributed systems are fundamentally in need of an event driven architecture to breakdown the tight dependencies between them. Using event streaming and pubsub allows you to publish and subscribe to relevant events async.

- **Service Registry**: Micro and M3O bake in service discovery so you can browse a directory of services to explore your service APIs and enable you to query services by name. Micro is all about microservices and multi-service development.

- **Service Network**: Because you don't want to have to resolve those service names to addresses and deal with the load balancing aspect, the server bakes in a "service mesh" which will handle your inter-service requests (as gRPC) and route to the 
appropriate instance.

- **Identity Proxy**: We include a separate identity proxy for external requests using gRPC via the CLI and other means. This enables you to query from your local machine or anywhere else using valid auth credentials and have it seamlessly work as if 
you were in the platform itself.

- **API Gateway**: Finally there’s an API gateway that automatically exposes your services to the outside world over HTTP. Internally writing service to service using gRPC makes sense, but at the end of the day we want to build APIs consumed from clients via HTTP.

### Clients

The server provides inter-service communication and two means of external communication with a HTTP API and gRPC proxy but that 
experience is made much better when there's user experience on the client side that works. Right now we've got two ways of doing this.

- **Command Line**: The CLI provides a convenient and simple way to talk to the server via gRPC requests through the proxy. 
The most convenient commands are builtin but every service you write also gets beautiful dynamic generated commands 
for each endpoint. 

- **gRPC SDKs**: Every service in the server is accessible via gRPC. We're code generating clients for the server itself 
so you can access them from any language. What this enables is a wide array of experiences on the client side without 
having to handcraft libraries for each language.

- **Web Interface**: Coming soon is a dynamically generated web interface that creates a simple query mechanism through a 
browser for any of your services. We've got a http api, gRPC proxy and command line interface but feel like the browser 
could use some love too.

### Framework

One thing we really understood from our time working on go-micro was that the developer experience really matters. We 
see Go as the dominant language for the cloud and believe most backend services in the cloud will be written in Go. For 
that reason we continue to include a Service Framework which acts as a framework for building your services and accessing 
the underlying systems of the server.

The Service Framework provides pre-initialised packages for all of the features of the server and creates a convenient 
initialiser for defining your own services starting with `service.New`. A Service has a name, endpoints, contains 
a server of its own and a client to query other services. The framework does enough for you but then attempts to 
get out of your way so the rest is up to you.

A main package for a Micro service looks something like this

```go
package main

import (
	"github.com/micro/micro/v3/service"
	"github.com/micro/micro/v3/service/logger"
	"github.com/micro/services/helloworld/handler"
)

func main() {
	// Create service
	srv := service.New(
		service.Name("helloworld"),
	)

	// Register Handler
	srv.Handle(new(handler.Helloworld))

	// Run the service
	if err := srv.Run(); err != nil {
		logger.Fatal(err)
	}
}
```

When you want to make use of something like the Config service just import it like so.

```go
import "github.com/micro/micro/v3/service/config"

val, err := config.Get("key")
```

You can find many more examples in [github.com/micro/services](https://github.com/micro/services).

## Environments

From our experience writing software isn't constrained to a single environment. Most of the time we're doing 
some form of local development followed by a push to staging and then production. We don't really see tools 
capturing that workflow effectively. Thinking about how to do this now we've built in environments as 
a first class system.

M3O offers 3 builtin environments; local, dev and platform.

- **Local** - is Micro running on your local machine
- **Dev** - is a free development environment in the cloud
- **Platform** - is a paid secure, scalable and supported production environment

Our goal here is to really direct the flow from local > dev > platform as the lifecycle for any backend service 
development. Start by running the server locally, writing your code and getting it to work. Ship it to the 
dev environment for further testing but also to collaborate with others and serve it publicly. Then if you're 
interested in a scalable and supported production environment, pay for the platform environment. That's it.

Interact with the environments like so.

```sh
# view the environments
micro env

# set the environment
micro env set dev

# add a new environment
micro env add foobar proxy.foo.com:443
```

Micro isn't constrained to our built in environments. You can add others as you wish.


### Local Environment

The local environment is just that, your local laptop. Its where development starts and normally 
this requires you to run all sorts of crazy infrastructure. Micro focuses on providing pluggable 
abstractions as gRPC services so your service just talks gRPC directly to Micro and we hide the 
details from you. Locally that means we're using best effort stuff like mdns, file storage, etc. 

We've almost made it drop dead simple to start locally. You just run one command. 

```sh
micro server
```

This will boot all the services you need and let you build a service that will look identical 
in any cloud environment running Micro as a Service.

Set your environment to the local server when using it.

```sh
micro env set local
```

Curl `localhost:8080` with your namespace

```sh
curl -H "Micro-Namespace: $NAMESPACE" "http://localhost:8080/helloworld?name=Alice"
```

Get your namespace like so

```sh
micro user namespace
```

This might be blank locally but you'll get the idea for how namespace isolation works in a bit.

### Dev Environment

The 'dev' environment is a free cloud hosted environment that provides Micro 3.0 as a Service. What we've 
learned in the past few years is that open source is not enough. There's some great open source tools out there 
but as soon as we get to deployment there's so many hurdles to overcome. The dev enviroment provides 
everyone the ability to get up and running in minutes with the same tools you'd use for local development 
in the cloud.

All you have to do is set the env to 'dev' and use it like local.

If you're using the dev environment URLs are `*.m3o.dev`. Find more details at [m3o.dev](https://m3o.dev)

### Platform Environment

The 'platform' environment is a secure, scalable and supported production environment for where you'd likely 
run customer facing services and products. This is a paid tier with 2x the resource limits of dev to start 
including slack & email support along with SLAs. You can think of it as the equivalent of a production platform 
you've come to know at any work place.

Our goal with Local, Dev and Platform is to invoke that workflow we've all come to know and expect as a real 
product. These are totally separate environments and they're managed exactly as that with M3O as well.

## Multi-Tenancy and Namespacing

With the advent of a system like kubernetes and a push towards the cloud we can see that there's really a need 
to move towards shared resource usage. The cloud isn't cheap and we don't all need to be running separate 
kubernetes clusters. In fact wouldn't it be great if we could share that? Well Micro is doing it. We build in 
multi-tenancy using the same logic kubernetes does called Namespaces. 

We've mapped this same experience locally so you get a rudimentary form of namespacing for local dev but 
mostly we're making use of kubernetes namespaces in production along with a whole host of custom written 
isolation mechanisms for authentication, storage, configuration, event streaming, etc so Micro 3.0 
can be used to host more than one tenant.

Whether you decide to self host and share your cluster for dev, staging and production we felt like 
multi-tenancy needs to become a defacto standard in 2020. How it works in practice. Each tenant 
get's a namespace. That namespace has its own isolated set of users and resources in each subsystem. 
When you make any request as a user or service, a JWT token is passed with that so the 
underlying systems can route to the appropriate resources.

Once you've signed up to the dev environment your namespace will be set for you. You can get it using 
the command

```sh
micro user namespace
```

When you're using any sort of CLI commands, your namespace and auth token are automatically injected 
into request including refreshing those tokens. The same happens for any of your services running 
on Micro. If you want to use the http API or the public api url [api.m3o.dev] then go ahead 
and grab your namespace and set the header as `Micro-Namespace`.

Additionally each namespace gets its own custom domain so the `foobar` namespace becomes `foobar.m3o.dev` 
with say the helloworld service routing would be to `foobar.m3o.dev/helloworld`.

## Source to Running 

Micro was built out of a frustration with the existing tools out there. One of the things I've really 
been saying for a long time is that I wanted "source to running" in just one command. With 
Heroku we sort of got that but it really took too much away from us. Back in 2010 Heroku was focused 
on monolithic Rails development. Since then I've really said Heroku took too much away and AWS gave 
too much back. We needed something in between.

Micro can take your source code, from a local directory or a repo thats hosted on github, gitlab or bitbucket. 
In one command it will upload or pull from the relevant place, package it as a container and 
run it. That's it. Source to running in just one command. No more need to deal with the pipeline, 
no more hacking away at containers and the container registries. Write some code and run it.

## Development Model

Source to running is cool. It's what a PaaS is really for but one thing that's really been lacking even 
with the new PaaS boom is a development model. As I eluded to, Heroku takes too much away and AWS 
gives too much back. We're looking for a happy medium. One that doesn't require us to rely on VMs or 
containers but on the other side doesn't limit us to monolithic development.

Micro has always focused on the practice of distributed systems development or microservices. The idea 
of breaking down large monolithic apps into smaller separate services that do one thing well. To do 
this we think you really have to bake the development model into the platform.

What we include is the concept of a Service which contains a Client and Server for both handling 
requests and making queries to other services. We focus on standardisation around protobuf for API 
definitions and using gRPC for the networking layering. 

Not only that we're including pubsub for an event streaming architecture and other pieces like 
nosql key-value storage and dynamic config management. We believe there are specific primitives 
required to start building microservices and distributed systems and that's what Micro looks 
to provide.

## Multi Language Clients

One of the key learnings we had from the development of a Go framework called [go-micro](https://github.com/asim/go-micro) was 
that we mostly use a single language for each platform we develop for such as web, mobile and so on. Cloud will be no different. 
We support Go for the Cloud, but think there needs to be an ecosystem for consumption of Go services and potentially extending beyond
where there's no way around using python, java, ruby, rust or javascript. Because Micro's interface is gRPC we code generate gRPC 
clients and allow any language to leverage the Micro server.

In the past multi-language clients have been pain stakingly hand crafted and one thing we learned from building a framework, 
it's incredibly hard to replicate this across languages also. With gRPC we've really found a happy medium of saying, there's 
a built in service framework you can use to write code really elegantly with Go but gRPC allows us to reduce the scope of the 
surface area and provide strongly typed clients that can support a different model of development, one that might have 
more scope for pushing microservices to wide scale adoption in a way that wasn't possible with frameworks.

We additionally include grpc-web generated clients which enable frontend to quickly and easily make use of typed javascript 
clients to leverage the same development as the backend. We've seen grpc-web slowly gain adoption internally at various 
companies and think this might extend to the public domain fairly rapidly as well.

See the [micro/client/sdk](https://github.com/micro/micro/tree/master/client/sdk) directory for the generated clients. These will be 
pubished to their respective package managers in the near future.

## Building API First Services

Micro was built to make microservices development much easier and to increase developer productivity on the backend, beyond 
being able to consume those services using gRPC we think the world still really cares about HTTP/JSON based APIs and so 
Micro include an API gateway which translates http/json to grpc requests automatically. This means everyone is building 
API first services in the cloud without having to do anything.

Here's a quick example.

Say you write helloworld on the backend with the following proto

```proto
syntax = "proto3";

package helloworld;

service Helloworld {
	rpc Message(Request) returns (Response) {}
}

message Request {
	string name = 1;
}

message Response {
	string msg = 1;
}
```

Then expose this as the "helloworld" service on the M3O platform. You'll instantly be able to access this as $namespace.m3o.dev/helloworld/message

We use path based resolution to map a http request to gRPC. So /[service]/[method] becomes [Service.Method]. If your microservice name doesn't match 
the proto for whatever reason (you have multiple proto Services) then it works slightly differently e.g your service name is foobar then the endpoint 
becomes `/foobar/helloworld/message`.

One neat hack we've picked up from web browser is auto detecting an endpoint so we can shorthand something to something like /helloworld. With the web 
if an index.html page is found its served. In our case if we find the `Call` method in your proto we'll automatically use it so /helloworld/call just 
shortens to /helloworld.

With Stripe, Twilio, Segment and others become huge API players, we think the world is going in that direction and you are probably building http apis 
too. So Micro builds in this in as a first class primitive. In future we'll also look to include support for graphql.

## Ten Commands

Alright so we talk a good game, but how easy is it? Well lets show you.

```sh
# Install the micro binary
curl -fsSL https://install.m3o.com/micro | /bin/bash

# Set env to dev for the free environment in the cloud
micro env set dev

# Signup before getting started
micro signup

# Create a new service (follow the instructions and push to Github)
micro new helloworld

# Deploy the service from github
micro run github.com/micro/services/helloworld

# Check the service status
micro status

# Query the logs
micro logs helloworld

# Call the service
micro helloworld --name=Alice

# Get your namespace
NAMESPACE=$(micro user namespace)

# Call service via the public http API
curl "https://$NAMESPACE.m3o.dev/helloworld?name=Alice"
```

Easy right? We see this as the common flow for most service development. Its a fast iterative loop
from generating a new template to shipping it and querying to make sure it works. There's 
additional stuff in the developer experience like actually writing the service but we think that's 
a separate post.

## Documentation

Another thing we really learned from the past is nothing like this works without great documentation 
and tutorials. So we've written a whole suite of docs for Micro available at [micro.mu](https://micro.mu) 
and provide help for using the M3O on [m3o.dev](https://m3o.dev/).

You can find other interesting resources at [Awesome Micro](https://github.com/micro/awesome-micro).

## Licensing

Micro continues to remain open source but licensed using [Polyform Shield](https://polyformproject.org/licenses/shield/1.0.0/) 
which prevents the software for being picked up and run as a service. This is to contend with AWS and others 
running open source for profit without contributing back. It's a longer conversation for another day.

## Motivations

We really believe that writing software for the cloud is too hard. That there's far too much choice and 
time wasted focusing on how to piece everything together. There are tradeoffs to adopting a PaaS but 
ultimately our focus is **developer productivity**. By choosing one tool and one way we stop thinking 
about the how and just get down to what we're trying to build.

M3O and Micro 3.0 look at the state of distributed systems development in the cloud native era and 
try to drastically simplify that experience with a platform that bakes in the development model 
so you can just get back to writing code.

## Deprecating Go Micro

We will now be ending support for [go-micro](https://github.com/micro/go-micro). Having personally 
spent 6 years since inception on go-micro I feel as though its time to finally let it go. What 
started as a tiny library to help write Kubernetes-as-a-Service back in 2014 turned into a widely 
used open source framework for Go microservices development. Having now amassed more than 14k stars 
you might wonder why we leave it behind. The truth is, while it solved a problem for many it never 
became what it was intended for.

Go Micro was built on the premise that developers need a simpler way to build distributed systems. 
With strongly defined abstractions and a pluggable architecture it did that well but that became 
really unwieldy to manage. With an MxN matrix of complexity, Go Micro became the thing it was 
trying to fight against. As we attempted to hone on this platform effort, it just became very 
clear that to do that we'd need to start fresh.

Go Micro will live on as an independent library under my own personal account on GitHub but 
it will no longer be supported as an official Micro project. Hopefully it finds second life in 
some other ways but for now we say goodbye.

If you'd like to upgrade from Go Micro v2 to Micro v3 please see this [upgrade guide](/v2-to-v3-upgrade-guide).

## Next Steps

You can use the Micro 3.O as a self-hosted open source solution locally, on a VPS or managed kubernetes, 
whatever works for you. Our goal is to facilitate a vastly superior developer experience for building 
services in the Cloud. Come join [Discord](https://discord.gg/hbmJEct) or [Slack](https://slack.m3o.com) 
to chat more about it. And lastly head to to [m3o.com](https://m3o.com) if you're tired of the way you're 
building software for today and want to learn of a better way that's going to make you 10x more productive.

So to revisit. To get started for free in the cloud based dev environment just run the following commands.

```sh
# Install the micro binary
curl -fsSL https://install.m3o.com/micro | /bin/bash

# Set the env to the dev environment
micro env set dev

# Signup before getting started
micro signup

# Create a new service (follow the instructions and push to Github)
micro new helloworld

# Deploy the service from github
micro run github.com/micro/services/helloworld

# Check the service status
micro status

# Query the logs
micro logs helloworld

# Call the service
micro helloworld --name=Alice

# Get your namespace
NAMESPACE=$(micro user namespace)

# Curl it via the public http API
curl "https://$NAMESPACE.m3o.dev/helloworld?name=Alice"
```

If you want to test things out locally first

```sh
# start the server locally
micro server

# set the environment to local
micro env set local

# login using user: admin pass: micro
micro login
```

And that's it! Please come chat with us in [Discord](https://discord.gg/hbmJEct) or [Slack](https://slack.m3o.com) and 
[invite friends](https://m3o.dev/getting-started/invite-users) to test out the M3O platform.

To learn more about the M3O platform see the dev docs at [m3o.dev](https://m3o.dev). And for the open source docs 
check out [micro.mu](https://micro.mu).

<br>
*Written by Asim Aslam*
<br>
Founder & CEO Micro