Feb 21, 2023
Very early on we were hungry for well-maintained, microservice-based applications that we could test against. When we looked at what was out there, we found Weavesocks for REST, and Online Boutique for gRPC. Thrift, unfortunately, was MIA. Besides the lack of Thrift, there were other challenges. Using two different applications made it hard to have consistent test cases across REST and gRPC.
We needed something better. We wanted an open-source sample microservices application that could be used for cloud native application development, API testing, and microservices testing across different standards–REST, gRPC, Thrift. Something extensible (e.g. adding GraphQL, eventually). While Weavesocks doesn’t look like it was being maintained, Google seems to be keeping up support for Online Boutique. So we forked Online Boutique and added REST and Thrift support in addition to gPRC.
We figured the Kubernetes engineering community could benefit from this project. So I’m here to share it with you, and to get your invaluable feedback.
Let me know what you think here. All feedback will be super appreciated!