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Show HN: Encore – Type-safe back end framework that generates infra from code

(github.com)
76 points andout_ | 2 comments | 14 Nov 25 11:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.196s | source
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ForHackernews ◴[14 Nov 25 13:26 UTC] No.45926503[source]▶
This an interesting idea, but I'd be skeptical of having this much coupling between application code and infrastructure. It's like an anti-12 Factor App.

It might make sense for something like a "serverless" app where the units of the business logic are intended to map directly onto cloud provider entities.

It reminds me of https://aws.github.io/chalice/ but cloud-agnostic and Typescript in place of Python

replies(1): >>45926639 #
1. andout_ ◴[14 Nov 25 13:46 UTC] No.45926639[source]▶
I'd argue it's the opposite of coupling. Your application code references logical resources (database connection, pub/sub topic, bucket) without knowing anything about the underlying infrastructure. Encore extracts these needs and a configurable planner transforms them into actual infrastructure.

The same application code can run locally (Docker), on AWS (RDS, SQS, Lambda), or GCP (Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run) without changes. That's less coupling than explicitly configuring cloud-specific resources in Terraform or even using cloud SDKs directly.

Re: Chalice - similar idea but Chalice is AWS-only and focused on serverless functions. Encore is cloud-agnostic and works for any backend architecture (monoliths, microservices, containers, functions).

replies(2): >>45927423 #>>45928625 #
2. ForHackernews ◴[14 Nov 25 16:42 UTC] No.45928625[source]▶
But you're inverting the dependency-injection pattern (dependency-extraction?) rather than feeding your app the things it needs to run, you're encoding the dependencies directly into the application code. Maybe it works great in practice, I haven't tried it, but it looks brittle and hard to test.