Platform Earth is a microservice platform for the commons. Microservices are traditionally employed by large companies, distributed across many departments and work teams, to achieve scalability, agility and the ability to maintain high reliability systems.
- Platform Earth Roadmap - Platform Earth Microservices - Platform Earth Components - Platform Earth Frontends - Platform for Cooperation - Platform Earth Activity
This architecture is particularly suited to decentralised organisation of the commons. Developers can work on smaller, more easily maintained code, use the toolchains of their choice, and this code can be reused across multiple organisations.
# No more silos
Using container based deployment such as docker, and continuous deployment from freely available version control environment like GitHub, open-source community projects can work together to create a Federated Microservice architecture which is able to scale at the lowest possible cost, while freeing up the community to create the front end experience and integrate the features of their choice.
# Advantages
There are significant advantages to be gained for the not-for-profit and cooperative sector in taking advantage of this architecture.
__First__ the time and effort to deploy a new service would be greatly reduced. Rather than each enterprise building its own backend, organisations could concentrate on integrating existing services into a uniquely crafted user experience using modern freely available HTML5 and Javascript based technology.
__Second__ universities, and cooperatives have scarce access to technologists and open source developers. Having found such a source their expertise may be in an unusual or inappropriate computer language for the application or framework they seek to build on. Php developers, ruby, python or javascript coders are unlikely to be able to work together, let alone maintain over a period of years, a small project.
Microservices solve this particular problem by enabling a developer to use the language of their choice to develop a microservice against a stable and documented API. This is an ideal scenario for managing the diverse range of open source developers willing to commit time to the commons.
__Third__, there are a new range of decentralised technologies emerging, largely though not exclusively, in the blockchain-space that promise to revolutionise financial services the sharing of resources and new forms of governance and democratic engagement (both in governments and in joint commercial ventures). These technologies while promising the ability to be deployed without conventional server infrastructure, face the problem of lack of convenience when compared to simply viewing content or a service in a web browser.
# Hurdles
However there are significant hurdles, and microservices are not yet widely deployed to this end remaining firmly entrenched in the corporate sector.
We aim to change that. Current barriers to adoption include the lack of familiarity and expertise outside of large companies, and the cost of setting up a service for any given individual or social enterprise. Second there is the issue of financing such an initiative, with problems of free-riders, and the inability of small enterprises to achieve economies of scale.
# See also - Platform for Cooperation - Microservices - DreamFactory - Creative Commons
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I wonder, can I make a computation run forever? Would future generations be happy that I did?