Breaking up monoliths into composite architectures (which consist of more than one code base) can help manage complexity, decoupling, and reusability. It also makes many things more complicated and repetitive. For example, now we have to:
- download many individual code bases onto your machine
- prepare them, for example by installing modules or compiling them
- install several runtimes or compilers for the different code bases, sometimes in conflicting versions in parallel.
- install and configure dependencies like databases, routers, and caches, in the right version for each service
- deploying now means testing, dockerizing, uploading, deploying, and configuring dozens/hundreds of individual code and data bases.
Developers either have to do all these things themselves, or they can find some some tools to do these things. There are good tools for many of these tasks, but they don't know about each other and don't work together. Some of them also lack features.
One way or another, everybody on the team has to install, configure, and learn to use complicated tools with inconsistent interfaces before being able to get the application running and make changes to it.
Exosphere solves this problem by making information about the composition of a code base explicit, which allows the various devops tools to work together. This makes it easy for anybody to work on any code base, without having to install, configure, master, and use a whole array of devops tools and learn how exactly they are used on each project.
You no longer have to coach your team around basics like installing, starting, testing, and deploying the application on their machines. Exosphere performs these basic devops tasks for you.
Instead of having to manually set up things by following outdated developer documentation, Exosphere gets the project running on your machine within minutes. You can cleanly add new services using templates defined by the tech lead.
Exosphere applications have scripts for setup, testing, and deployment. This makes it easier to set up CI servers and deploy to various environments like dev, qa, staging, production, etc.
Exosphere drastically reduces the ramp-up time for engineers, in some examples from a week to minutes. Non-technical people like designers or product managers can run the application on their machines. Your tech lead is less busy with devops support for the team, and has more time for strategic work with you.