| seotitle | seodesc | title | subtitle |
|---|---|---|---|
Introduction to Encore – the backend development platform |
Learn how Encore works and how it helps backend developers build cloud based backend applications with a flow state developer experience. |
What is Encore? |
Escape cloud complexity and put the fun back into backend development |
Cloud services enable scalable systems but have poor developer experience. Much of our time is spent on repetitive work that doesn't add anything unique to our applications. Encore is designed to solve this problem and restore the joy and creativity of programming.
Encore is a special-purpose tool for backend development. Similar to how game engines help game developers, it integrates the development process for backend developers.
Encore lets you write regular Go code, but uses annotations to avoid common distributed systems boilerplate. It also provides cloud-agnostic APIs to declare infrastructure directly in application code, eliminating the need for infrastructure configuration files.
This simplifies the process of building microservices applications, making it as straightforward as building a monolith.
By providing built-in tools to simplify common development and DevOps use-cases, Encore helps speed up your development process. Through static analysis of your application code, all tools work out-of-the-box without any configuration or setup.
Shorten development feedback loops with tools like:
- Interactive architecture diagrams
- Preview environments
- Distributed tracing
- Secrets management
- Generated API documentation
When you deploy with Encore, it builds and tests your application and automatically provisions the required cloud infrastructure using best-practices for each cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure).
It does this by parsing the application code and creating a model of how it works, then generating boilerplate code and provisioning infrastructure based on the use of the provided cloud-agnostic APIs.
- Run
git push encoreto build, test, provision necessary infrastructure, and deploy. - Free built-in hosting on Encore Cloud for development and hobby use. (See usage limits)
Press play to see how you can use Encore to build a backend service and deploy it to the cloud in 5 minutes.
<iframe width="360" height="202" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IwplIbwJtD0?controls=0" title="Encore Demo" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>Encore is designed to give teams a productive and less complex experience when solving most backend use cases. There are many developers using Encore to build things like:
- CRUD backends and REST APIs.
- Microservices backends for advanced web and mobile apps.
- Highly performant APIs providing advanced business logic to 3rd parties.
- Services powering new features, in applications with existing backend systems.
- And much more...
Encore is designed for large-scale software engineering, informed by our team's decades-long experience from places like Google and Spotify.
Encore lets developers to express cloud infrastructure as logical statements in application code, which become self-provisioning using the Encore platform. This means Encore applications can scale according to evolving requirements without needing to change application code.
This allows for rapid prototyping and development using cheap local and cloud infrastructure, while also allowing the application to handle increased scale as it moves to production and beyond.
The reason we normally have to write boilerplate, and manually provision cloud services, is that the tools we use have no idea what we're trying to do. So it's up to the developer to do all the work.
Encore is designed to understand what you're building, in order to deliver capabilities like real-time architecture diagrams and automatic infrastructure provisioning. It achieves this understanding by being opinionated about certain aspects of development, such as having a standardized way of expressing APIs, defining services, and declaring infrastructure.
This approach gives developers the freedom to focus on solving new problems, instead of re-solving common problems over and over again.
Developers make dozens of decisions when creating a backend application. Deciding how to structure the codebase, defining API schemas, picking underlying infrastructure, etc. The decisions often come down to personal preferences, not technical rationale. This creates a huge problem in the form of fragmentation! When every stack looks different, all tools have to be general purpose.
When you adopt Encore, many of these stylistic decisions are already made for you. Encore's framework ensures your application follows modern best practices. And when you run your application, Encore's Open Source parser and compiler checks that you're sticking to the framework. This means you're free to focus your energy on what really matters: writing your application's business logic.
Encore is deeply integrated with the Go programming language. This is not to say Encore is only for Go developers! Most backend developers will get incredible value from using Encore, and learning Go should not stop anyone from trying Encore.
Really, why is picking a programming language seen as the most important decision in a new project? When you set out to build a new backend, there are often very few rational arguments for why one language is better than another. The only real difference is personal taste.
Encore uses static analysis to understand your application. This is a fancy term for parsing and analyzing the code you write and creating a graph of how your application works. This graph closely represents your own mental model about your system: boxes and arrows, representing systems and services that communicate with other systems, pass data and connect to infrastructure. We call it the Encore Application Model.
Because Encore's framework, parser, and compiler, are all designed together, Encore is able to ensure 100% accuracy when creating the application model. Any deviation from the framework is caught as a compilation error.
Using the model Encore is able to provide tools to solve problems that normally would be up to the developer to do manually, from creating architecture diagrams and API documentation, to provisioning cloud infrastructure.
We're continuously expanding on Encore's capabilities and are building a new generation of developer tools that are enabled by Encore's understanding of your application.
The framework, parser, and compiler that enable this are all Open Source.
You made it to the end of the page – we hope you are as excited as we are about making backend development fun again!
Next, we recommend following the Quick Start Guide. It gives you a taste of the Encore workflow and takes only around 5-10 minutes to complete, depending on your familiarity with Go.
After completing the guide, why not browse through the docs in your own areas of interest, or join Slack to ask any questions you might have?
Finally, we recommend you follow and star the project on GitHub to stay up to date.