from Hacker News

Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

by chuhnk on 11/12/20, 11:44 AM with 62 comments

  • by jfengel on 11/12/20, 2:20 PM

    Your page doesn't show any of the backend code being deployed. I don't even know what language it's in.

    So it's a little hard for me to compare it to Netlify, which does have backend support in the form of lambdas, and a database in the form of FaunaDB. That's fairly limited, but it's also very easy.

    Clicking through to the github page, it looks like the examples are in Go... though I also see a Dockerfile. For me, I'd be more interested in having your blurb page focus more on how one writes the back end, since that's what you're really selling.

  • by brabel on 11/12/20, 12:45 PM

    I've been looking for exactly that: a backend thing that's as easy to setup as Netlify is for the frontend.

    Micro seems to be a Go framework evolved to automatically deploy code to the "cloud", but it seems it'll remain limited to Go backends... I can write Go without problems, but I wanted something that supports other languages as well, specially Java... I think RedHat seems to offer that with OpenShift and Quarkus[1], but their material is so ridden with marketing buzzwords I am not sure it's suitable for what I'm looking for (basically, a small server that can store a small amount of documents or key-value information on whatever database the platform supports without fuss).

    Heroku seems to be the most close to this I could find, but it's pretty expensive from what I saw if you need a DB.

    Does anyone have suggestions for alternatives?

    [1] https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/05/28/quarkus-a-kube...

  • by hans0l074 on 11/12/20, 12:17 PM

    When I read about such abstractions and "simplifications" (which usually end up with a 10 box diagram simplified to a 2-3 box diagram), I often hesitate to start building something new, always wondering "Am I doing this in the most "<tech_forum> upvoted" way of implementing such a thing? Some of this tech feels like if you switch on, and stare at your monitor long enough, a "Hello World" API will be deployed on the cloud for you, voilà!

  • by simoneau on 11/12/20, 4:20 PM

    Make sure you're cool with micro's license: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/shield/1.0.0/ The noncompete clause is problematic.

  • by clafferty on 11/12/20, 1:14 PM

    Bravo m3o, this looks awesome!

    Netlifys approach to static sites seemed like a no brainer since HTML is easy to host. They added lots of sugar around that to make it effortless and easy. So M3o seems like a great idea.

    Micro on the other hand will need some buy in but I'll definitely consider it since we use Go already.

    One concern is your pricing seems too reasonable (free)!

  • by rishav_sharan on 11/12/20, 12:56 PM

    What about the database? All these Jamstack articles always seem to skip past a db in their examples and I have never seen an "app" without an associated database.

    Or is the KV store supposed to act like an app database?

  • by wetpaws on 11/12/20, 5:21 PM

    Yow dawg, you fleed to netlify to avoid insane over-engineered technology stacks, so we brought you insane over-engineered technology stack with protobuffs and gRPC

  • by asim on 11/12/20, 1:03 PM

    Hi HN! Asim here. Founder CEO of Micro. We've been working on M3O for some time now and excited to not only share it with the world but help understand our positioning amongst other technology such as Netlify and the frontend. Happy to answer any questions.

  • by afterwalk on 11/12/20, 10:42 PM

    The value proposition was clear and well written, until I got to this part:

    "you want to do it without having to standup layers of infrastructure on AWS or be beholden to the legacy players like Heroku or other providers who don’t get that you want the same Netlify like experience on the backend."

    So exactly how is Heroku "legacy"? From past experiences pushing a simple backend service onto Heroku was pretty smooth and "Netlify-esq".

    It would be nice to explain or show the shortcomings of using Heroku as the backend for your Netlify app.

  • by LogicX on 11/12/20, 2:57 PM

    Biggest thing for me is netlify’s distributed nature. I don’t see anything about m3o being in multiple data centers the way fly.io is. For me, that better aligns with an appropriate backend for Netlify. (Or cloudflare workers)

  • by asim on 11/13/20, 6:41 AM

    For anyone else who finds this and wants to know more about the internals of Micro itself. Here's the announcement post for Micro 3.0 aka M3O.

    https://micro.mu/blog/2020/11/05/micro-v3-aka-m3o.html

  • by BenGosub on 11/12/20, 4:24 PM

    Microservices have to be written in Go Nitro framework, this is not framework/language agnostic?

  • by sebringj on 11/12/20, 8:37 PM

    Netlify also has lambdas and coupled with firebase or faunadb, its pretty good.

  • by agambrahma on 11/12/20, 9:40 PM

    Interesting but perplexing: is this sort of an alternative to Darklang?