Encore is the end-to-end Backend Development Platform that lets you escape cloud complexity.
Encore – Backend Development Platform
🏁 Try Encore: Quick Start Guide / Example Applications
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How Encore works
Most backend applications use a small set of common building blocks: services, APIs, databases, queues, caches, and cron jobs. The real complexity lies in provisioning and managing the underlying infrastructure, and the endless boilerplate that's required to tie it all together in your application.
Encore simplifies backend development by providing an Infrastructure SDK that lets you declare and use these common building blocks as objects directly in your code. It currently supports Go and TypeScript (Beta).
Encore parses your application and builds a graph of both its logical architecture and its infrastructure requirements. It then automatically provisions the necessary infrastructure, instruments your application with logs and traces, and much more.
It works the same way for local development, preview and test environments, and in production using your cloud account.
This completely removes the need for infrastructure configuration files, increases standardization in both your codebase and infrastructure, and makes your application portable across cloud providers by default.
Learn more about using Encore's building blocks in the docs:
Key features
Microservices without complexity: Define services and API endpoints without boilerplate, and make API calls using regular function calls.
Develop as if the infrastructure is already in place: Encore's Infrastructure SDK lets you define databases, queues, caches, and scheduled tasks, as objects in your code.
Built-in DevOps: Run git push encore
to build, test, provision the necessary cloud infrastructure, and deploy.
Provision environments automatically: Deploy to unlimited dev/preview/cloud environments in without code changes. Encore provisions the necessary infrastructure and ensures environments stay in sync.
Deploy to your own cloud: Encore deploys your application to your cloud in AWS or GCP, using best practices like least-privileges security.
Preview environments: Integrate with GitHub to get an ephemeral preview environment for every Pull Request.
Distributed Tracing: Your application is automatically instrumented to capture information about API calls, HTTP requests, database queries, and more.
Intelligent architecture diagrams: Visualise your system in with automated and interactive architecture diagrams.
Metrics: Encore comes with built-in metrics and dashboards, and provides simple integrations with your favorite observability tools.
Secrets management: Define secrets in code, like any other variable, and use the built-in secrets manager to store them securely.
Service Catalog & Automatic API docs: Encore parses your source code to understand the request/response schemas for all your APIs and automatically generates a Service Catalog and high-quality API Documentation.
Generated Frontend Clients: Automatically generate type-safe API clients to integrate with your frontend.
Why choose Encore?
Common use cases
Encore is designed to give teams a productive and less complex experience when solving most backend use cases. Many teams use Encore to build things like:
Getting started
Open Source
The Encore infrastructure SDK, parser, compiler, and CLI are all Open Source. A free Encore account is needed to unlock features like distributed tracing, secrets management, and deploying to cloud environments, as this functionality is orchestrated by the Encore Platform.
Join the most pioneering developer community
Developers building with Encore are forward-thinkers who want to focus on creative programming and building great software to solve meaningful problems. It's a friendly place, great for exchanging ideas and learning new things! Join the conversation on Slack.
We rely on your contributions and feedback to improve Encore for everyone who is using it. Here's how you can contribute:
Demo video
Visuals Code example (Go)
Encore.example.1.mp4
Local Development Dashboard
indexvideo_5.mp4
Generated Architecture Diagrams & Service Catalog
index_1.mp4
Auto-Provisioning Infrastructure & Multi-cloud Deployments
envs.mp4
Distributed Tracing & Metrics
indexxxxx.mp4
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Who's behind Encore?
Encore was founded by long-time backend engineers from Spotify, Google, and Monzo with over 50 years of collective experience. We’ve lived through the challenges of building complex distributed systems with thousands of services, and scaling to hundreds of millions of users.
Encore grew out of these experiences and is a solution to the frustrations that came with them: unnecessary crippling complexity and constant repetition of undifferentiated work that suffocates the developer’s creativity. With Encore, we want to set developers free to achieve their creative potential.
Who is Encore for?
For individual developers building for the cloud, Encore provides a radically improved experience. With Encore you’re able to stay in the flow state and experience the joy and creativity of building.
For startup teams who need to build a scalable backend to support the growth of their product, Encore lets them get up and running in the cloud within minutes. It lets them focus on solving the needs of their users, instead of spending most of their time re-solving the everyday challenges of building distributed systems in the cloud.
For teams in mature organizations that want to focus on innovating and building new features, Encore lets them stop spending time on operations and onboarding new team members. Using Encore for new feature development is easy, just spin up a new backend service in a few minutes.
How is Encore different?
Encore is the only tool that understands what you’re building. Encore uses static analysis to deeply understand the application you’re building. This enables a unique developer experience that helps you stay in the flow as you’re building. For instance, you don't need to bother with configuring and managing infrastructure, setting up environments and keeping them in sync, or writing documentation and drafting architecture diagrams. Encore does all of this automatically out of the box.
Unlike many tools that aim to only make cloud deployment easier, Encore is not a cloud hosting provider. With Encore, you can use your cloud account with AWS and GCP. This means you’re in control of your data and can maintain your trust relationship with your cloud provider. You can also use Encore's development cloud for free, with pretty generous "fair use" limits.
Why is the Encore SDK integrated with a cloud platform?
We've found that to meaningfully improve the developer experience, you have to operate across the full stack. Unless you understand how an application is deployed, there are a large number of things in the development process that you can't simplify. That's why so many other developer tools have such a limited impact. With Encore's more integrated approach, we're able to unlock a radically better experience for developers.
What if I want to migrate away from Encore?
Encore has been designed to let you go outside of the SDK when you want to, and easily drop down in abstraction level when you need to, so you never need to run into any dead-ends.
Should you want to migrate away, it's straightforward and does not require a big re-write. 95% of your code is regular Go or TypeScript and the code specific to Encore is limited to using the Infrastructure SDK.
Encore has built-in support for ejecting your application as a way of removing the connection to the Encore Platform. Ejecting your app produces a standalone Docker image that can be deployed anywhere you'd like, and can help facilitate the migration away according to the process above.
Migrating away is low risk since Encore deploys to your cloud account from the start, which means there's never any data to migrate.
Open Source also plays a role. Encore's code generation, compiler, and parser are all open source and can be used however you want. So if you run into something unforeseen down the line, you have free access to the tools you might need.
And since Encore is designed for building distributed systems, it's straightforward to use it in combination with other backends that aren't built with Encore. So if you come across a use case where Encore for some reason doesn't fit, you won't need to tear everything up and start from scratch. You can just build that specific part without Encore.
We believe that adopting Encore is a low-risk decision, given it needs no initial investment in foundational work. The ambition is to simply add a lot of value to your everyday development process, from day one.
Contributing to Encore and building from source
See CONTRIBUTING.md.
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