nitric

README

Nitric is a provider independent framework and runtime for cloud-native and serverless applications. Using Nitric, applications take advantage of cloud-native services for events, queues, compute, APIs, storage, and documents without direct integration to cloud specific APIs.

This decoupling enables applications to remain portable between cloud-providers and alternate deployment options such as Kubernetes or stand-alone servers, from a single application codebase.

Documentation

The full documentation is available at nitric.io/docs

Status

Nitric is currently in Public Preview, anyone can use or deploy applications, but work remains and changes are likely

Nitric Membrane

The Membrane is at the heart of the solution. Nitric applications communicate with the Membrane via gRPC to access the following services in a provider agnostic way:

• Events
• Queues
• Storage & Buckets
• Document Store
• Secret Store

We provide an expressive infrastructure-as-code style SDK for Node.js. However, Nitric is built on gRPC, so support for many languages is possible.

If you have additional languages you'd like supported, let us know in the issues, we also welcome community contributions for new language support.

Development

Requirements

• Git
• Golang (1.16)
• Make
• Docker
• Google Protocol Buffers Compiler

Getting Started

Install dependencies

make install-tools

Install Protocol Buffers

Download the Google Protobuf Compiler (standalone binary called protoc) from https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf and add it to your $PATH.

On MacOS with Homebrew, you can run brew install protobuf On Fedora, run sudo dnf install -y protobuf protobuf-compiler protobuf-devel

Run unit tests

make test

Run integration tests

make test-integration

Build Static Membranes

AWS

Standard Binary

Linux support only - used in container images and for production.

make aws-static

Cross-platform Binary

Useful for local testing

make aws-static-xp

Container Images

make aws-docker

Google Cloud Platform

Standard Binary

Linux support only - used in container images and for production.

make gcp-static

Cross-platform Binary

Useful for local testing

make gcp-static-xp

Container Images

make gcp-docker

Dev Membrane

Note: the Dev Membrane should only be used for local development and testing.

Standard Binary

The dev binary is always cross-platform, since it doesn't need to be optimized for production deployments.

make dev-static

Container Images

make dev-docker

Run Locally

To run the membrane server locally, perform a local build of the membrane binary for the platform you're targeting, then run the resulting binary.

Example building and running the static Google Cloud Membrane locally

# Make the GCP Static Cross-platform binary
make gcp-static-xp

# Run the membrane binary
./bin/membrane

Note: for the AWS membrane, the Lambda Gateway (default) will fail to start. Instead, set the GATEWAY_ENVIRONMENT environment variable so that the HTTP gateway is launched instead.

# Make the AWS Static Cross-platform binary
make aws-static-xp

# Set environment variable in subshell, then run the membrane binary
(export GATEWAY_ENVIRONMENT=http; ./bin/membrane)

Running without a child process

It can be useful to run the Membrane in a 'service only' mode, where the cloud APIs are available but you don't need/want to start a child process to handle incoming request. This can be achieved by setting the MIN_WORKERS variable to 0:

(export MIN_WORKERS=0; ./bin/membrane)

Project Structure

The Membrane project source code structure is outlined below:

Directory	Package	Description
/interfaces/nitric/v1	v1	protoc generated GRPC services code
/pkg/adapters/grpc	grpc	GRPC service to SDK adaptors
/pkg/membrane	membrane	membrane application
/pkg/plugins/...	...	Cloud service SDK plugins
/pkg/providers/...	main	Cloud provider main application and plugin injection
/pkg/sdk	sdk	SDK service interfaces
/pkg/triggers	triggers	provides Nitric event triggers
/pkg/utils	utils	provides utility functions
/pkg/worker	worker	Membrane workers representing function/service connections
/tests/mocks/...	...	Cloud service SDK mocks
/tests/plugins/...	...	Plugin services integration test suites
/tools	tools	include for 3rd party build tools