Often I find myself in a situation that requires a quick and dirty custom micro-service to support one Proof-Of-Concept or another, with a wide array of NPM available module I usually resort to nodejs and in few minutes I’d have a nodejs script that does exactly what I wanted until just few weeks ago the only option I had for hosting that service would have been hook.io, a free micro-services hosting service that provides decent yet none stellar performance QoS such as with any cloud based free service often things didn’t work at the required performance level and sometimes the nodejs module I wanted wasn’t available on the server, however other than starting my own app engine and installing all the containers and all the associated hassle I had to make do with whatever was generously offered by hook.io.
In comes Micro-Cule, Micro-cule is a Software Development Kit and Command Line Interface for spawning streaming stateless HTTP microservices for any programming language or arbitrary binary.
Installed on my amazon micro instance it doesn’t take more than one, yes ONE command to spawn a fully qualified micro-service to do my bidding, and here is the fun part it supports 20 different languages, so basically its like self hosting a very lean easy to manage middleware that can turn any of your hacked scripts into webservices. Micro-Cule is part of hook.io project but it offers the core service without the whole hook.io array of bells and whistles which I think is a very smart move from hook.io people, given that most of the potential users would just want to run their own webservices rather than offer a webservices hosting service.
I’m in love with microcule given how it has liberated me from heroku, google apps, amazon lambda and the even more cumbersome self hosted solutions and For all means and purposes i think microcule is the perfect webservices hosting solution for prototyping, testing and development, perhaps even production with some careful configuration.
