Most developers are by now familiar with the concept of type-safety in programming. It brings benefits like increasing predictability, reducing bugs, and helping ensure your application behaves as expected.
🤔 But have you ever considered applying type-safety to your infrastructure?
This innovation allows developers to integrate infrastructure components, such as databases or pub/sub, as safely-typed objects within the application.
💪 The results?
Streamlined development, early error detection, and a smoother deployment process. Let's dive into the practical benefits of type-safe infrastructure and how you can get started using it.
✨ Type-Safe Infrastructure: The Upside
Type-safe infrastructure helps to unify your application's code and its infrastructure layer, to provide several compelling advantages:
- Faster iterations: With type-safe infrastructure, you can identify infrastructure problems as early as in your code editor, instead of learning about issues via the — much slower — deployment cycle.
- Fewer Mistakes: By catching infrastructure earlier, you can drastically reduce post-deployment issues that affect users.
- Easier Workflow: Developing for the cloud is normally cumbersome and requires many manual steps to ensure you have a local environment or test environment that matches production. By making infrastructure a type-safe part of your code, it's possible to use tools to automatically provide production-like local infrastructure for development and testing.
🔬 Practical Example: The Pub/Sub Model
Take the widely-used Pub/Sub (publish-subscribe) model as an example — commonly used to create event-driven applications.
Normally, Pub/Sub mechanisms are blind to the data structures of the messages they handle. This is a common source of hard-to-catch errors that can be a nightmare to debug.
With type-safe infrastructure, there's a real paradigm shift. You can now achieve end-to-end type-safety from the moment of publishing a message, right through to delivery. This not only eliminates those annoying hard-to-debug errors but also translates to major time savings for us developers.
🙋♂️ Getting Started with Type-Safe Infrastructure
At Encore we're pioneering the concept of type-safe infrastructure, and have created an Open Source Infrastructure SDK that makes adopting this new concept a smooth experience for developers.
With the SDK, you can start declaring infrastructure components as type-safe objects as part of your code. It's currently available for Go (Golang), and TypeScript is just about to launch (December 2023). (👉 Join Slack to get in the TypeScript Beta.)
👉 Benefits of using Encore for Type-Safe Infrastructure
Aside from getting end-to-end type-safety, Encore's Backend Development Platform comes with several other perks:
- Auto-generation of microservices boilerplate.
- Automated local environment setup with local developer dashboard and automated testing on dedicated local infra.
- Automated cloud deployments to your AWS or GCP account.
- Built-in tooling: Encore automatically hooks up your app with distributed tracing, provides key metrics, automatically generates your API docs, and more.
🕹 Getting Started
For developers eager to try out the simple workflow that type-safe infrastructure enables, check out this tutorial for building a REST API with a PostgreSQL database.👈 It will show you the fundamentals of the type-safe infrastructure workflow.
To figure out how to use Encore for your current project, join the developer community on Slack for guidance, or check out the docs.
Wrapping up
Type-safe infrastructure is the next logical step in cloud-native backend development. Most of the cumbersome work of building distributed systems dependent on cloud services can now be automated. It's time to embrace the future and evolve!
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