a+construction-kit

Interactive visual designer for cloud-native applications.

Motivation

Let's suppose that developer need to create and deploy simple web service to cloud. The implementation of that service might take some time, let's say one day. We could argue that developer's work is done at this point.

The problem, however, is that many other things needs to be finished to successfully deploy such web service. Namely:

Interfaces to data storage or storages needs to be configured properly.
Interfaces to streaming tools usually needs to be configured too.
Dtto if the web service has to talk with other services via some message broker.
Logging needs to be configured.
Alerts needs to be configured.
Dashboard or with service metrics needs to be created.
Connection to tracking tool.
CI/CD setup.
And the service itself needs to be deployed to selected cloud, of course.

For smaller web services (and we live in microservices world after all) it might mean, that time to deliver the service might be five to ten times longer than the solution (algorithm, source code) itself!

Also, many project setup and configuration is done by copy&pasting old code from "somewhere". It would be much better to have a more intelligent solution.

Clearly there's space for a tool that take care of all those "minor" tasks that have to be done.

Solution

The problem can be split into two parts:

Code itself.
Configuration, interfaces to external services, and deployment.

The first part can not be automated, but the second part can be fully created by computer, based on provided "schema".

The "schema" is basically architecture of service or microservice created by user:

The following things can be created automatically based on schema provided:

Project stub for selected language
Dependency setup for selected language
Interfaces to storage, streaming platforms, message brokers
Interfaces to other systems (Prometheus/Grafana etc.)
Deployment configuration
Deployment scripts

Look

Installation

git clone https://github.com/tisnik/a-plus-construction-kit

Usage

When Clojure+Leiningen are installed

lein run -- $@

When just JRE is installed and uberjar is prepared

java -cp ack.jar ack.core

Uberjar preparation

lein uberjar
mv target/uberjar/ack-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar ack.jar

Development mode

In this case changes in sources are immediatelly made live.

lein ring server-headless

TODO

Model for frontend-backend application
Graphical editor for frontend-backend application
Add missing Go libraries into the model
Add missing Python libraries into the model

Known bugs

...

License

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.