I get to work with serverless microservices on a daily basis, those are services I use myself and ones I help our customers build to take advantage of the benefits that serverless brings you. With many services needing to be deployed and continuous updates, I found myself doing the same thing over and over. It is that specific task that frustrates me most; it simply wasn’t as seamless as I thought it could be.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how I cut the development time and make deployments easily repeatable like a walk in the park — thanks to the combination of the Serverless Framework and a tool called Project Flogo.

Together with the O’Reilly team we did a webinar on visually building microservices. Modern and digital experiences today are powered by the fine-grained units of execution we call microservices. However, building microservices isn’t always simple—especially if you’re not an expert developer. How can we make it easy for developers and architects to visually create an API definition so they don’t need to become Swagger experts? Developing your microservices can also be complex, especially when you also need to take into account API specification. How can you visually create your microservices and deploy the same project in a private cloud, a public cloud, and on-prem?

Last year on February 14th we published a blog post on “Building the Ultimate Valentine’s API.” Personally, I had a lot of fun writing it and finding facts related to how we spend our Valentine’s Day (though I forgot to bring home chocolates and flowers to my wife, who was none too pleased)! To prevent history from repeating itself, we’re taking things a step further this year with a Valentine’s Day webinar on why Integration + Cloud = A Match Made in Heaven.

Today I spoke at a Meetup group to discuss the Go Programming Language. Together with an awesome colleague (Miguel Torres) we spoke about Project Flogo and the lessons we learned building it. Click on the link to check out the talk on YouTube.

This year I wasn’t able to attend re:Invent, but I did want to do something nice in between the live streams and specifically around Serverless compute and AWS Lambda.

Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume — there is no charge when your code is not running. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service — all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability.

With Project Flogo you can visually create Ultralight Edge Microservices and run them anywhere. But what if you want to run those incredibly light microservices using one of the most powerful container management platforms, Kubernetes?

Prerequisites

As described on the Kubernetes website

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

If you haven’t set up your own Kubernetes cluster yet, I can absolutely recommend looking at minikube. The team has made an amazing effort to make it super easy to run your own cluster locally with minimal installation effort.

The explosion of SaaS as the typical acquisition pattern for enterprise software means that any given organization has (or will have) dozens of apps to connect to each other. In fact, the average Marketing department uses about 30 different SaaS apps, and the average HR department…

Last month TIBCO added the ability to add custom activities to TIBCO Cloud Integration — Web Integrator (I’ll use Web Integrator going forward). The Web Integrator experience is “Powered by Project Flogo”, so when you create your own extensions for Web Integrator, and use them in every flow that you want, those activities will work with Project Flogo as well. In this blog post I’ll walk through creating a new extension that connects to IFTTT using the WebHooks service.

Back in 2012, the engineering team at Heroku created a set of best practices to develop and run web apps. That document, consisting of 12 incredibly important ‘rules’, was dubbed the 12 Factor App manifesto. Over the years the document gained a lot of traction and especially with the rise of microservices having a 12 Factor App compliant app became important. With the rise of microservices a lot of other practices and tools (like git, DevOps, Docker and Configuration Management) became very popular as well.

Pretty much all the large cloud platforms provide not only a great visual interface to get things done, they also have a great command line interface. As much as I love a great UI when browsing the web, I do tend to favor the command line interfaces when I’m focusing on developing things.