Getting started with Phoesion Glow, the backend service development solution for human beings

Phoesion Glow is a cloud-native framework designed for dotnet (micro-)services with features like service-bus, load-balancing, scaling, logging/tracing, monitoring and cluster management, service-to-service discovery/communication and more. It also includes a lot of GUI/CLI developer tools (eg. aspire-like dashboards) and build-in Distributed application services like persistent key-value storage (caching), Mutexes, Job-Scheduling, State-Machines, FeatureFlags etc.

 

To get started without installing ANY tools, you can give it as quick try using docker containers, by :

1. Downloading the "hello world" sample code

2. Start the Reactor service container using :
   

   docker run --name reactor-2.x -d -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -p 15000-15010:15000-15010 -p 16000:16000 phoesion/phoesion.glow.reactor-dev
   

3. Run the sample (using Visual Studio)

4. Open http://localhost/HelloWorld/Greeter/SayHello and you should see a "Hello World" response.

 

What happened behind the scenes to produce that response?

The ingress/mediator service (running in container) received the http request and, using the service-bus (also in container), made an RPC call to your service (running in visual studio), that handled it and returned the response. All this happened automatically, without needing to configure any of them! and it's because all components were build from the ground-up to work together as part of a complete (opinionated) solution

 

To get the full developer experience, including developer dashboard, i recommend installing the tools:

1. Stop/Delete the reactor container from docker (it will not be needed anymore)
2. Close Visual Studio (so new templates can be installed)
3. Download and install the tools (Blaze)

Now, open up the sample code again in Visual Studio and run the service. The developer dashboard will pop-up giving your visibility to you service metrics, structured logging, tracing and more. Your are now fully setup to start developing services using Phoesion Glow!

There a lot of samples demonstrating the capabilities of Glow, have a look and try them out!

 

Some notable samples include :

• 1_REST : a lot of examples for creating your web APIs
• 2_Interop : service to service communication.
• 10_AspHosting : running ASP services in Glow
• 0b_Logging : structured logging sample
• 27_* - 31_* (AppXXX services) : distributed application services like job scheduling, state machines, mutexes and caches.

If you find it interesting and would like to know more information and how to run/deploy your services in your cloud or on-premises let me know.

 

Screenshots

This is a screenshot of the developer dashboard

This is a screenshot of Blaze, the service cluster management dashboard