Microsoft’s Project Tye aims to tame microservices development

Finding it tough to work with microservices? With Project Tye, Microsoft is offering an experimental developer tool intended to make it easier to build, test, and deploy microservices and distributed applications.

Microsoft believes Project Tye, a .NET Foundation project introduced May 21, will ease common pain points developers encounter when building applications that talk to a database or that are comprised of multiple services that communicate with each other. Project Tye is designed to make it easier for developers to run multiple application components simultaneously and to deploy distributed apps to platforms such as Kubernetes. 

The main goals of Project Tye include:

• Simplifying microservices development by running many services with a single command, using dependencies in containers, and discovering addresses of other services by using simple conventions.
• Automating deployment of .NET applications to Kubernetes by automatically containerizing these applications, generating Kubernetes manifests with minimal configuration, and using a single configuration file.

Project Tye is being described as an experiment that will last at least until November 2020, when .NET 5 ships. It will be re-evaluated at that time. In the meantime, new features are to be released roughly every four weeks.

Development features will be oriented toward local development, with developers advised to avoid running Project Tye in a container unless necessary. Microsoft is interested in making Tye deployable to a variety of runtime environments.

Project Tye requires .NET Core 3.1. It can be installed as a global tool using the following command:

dotnet tool install -g Microsoft.Tye --version "0.2.0-alpha.20258.3"

Microsoft also has posted instructions for running single and multiple services using Tye along with tips on deploying to Kubernetes.