This week, we continued working on our "Hello World" example microservices. This allowed us to get a feel for what technologies are used by developers to build microservices (ee the hello_world_as branch for a simple example in which a client requests a temperature in Fahrenheit from the server and converts it to Celsius). Specifically, we worked with NodeJS and gRPC. The next step would be to try to deploy a very simple "Hello World" type microservice on Ambiance, or to develop a slightly more complicated microservice to deploy on Ambiance. Additionally, we've continued exploring Kubernetes tutorials to identify the pros/cons of using Kubernetes for deployment orchestration.
Towards the end of this week we pivoted towards surveying/evaluating the various ways in which developers write microservices today and identifying the types of applications that they are used for. In our research, we've come across some questions that we would like investigate more, such as why Java and NodeJS are popular technologies for microservice development;