Declarative Infrastructure: Rethinking Cloud Native for JS

Andre Ericsson is the founder and CEO of Encore. Prior to founding Encore, he was a staff engineer at Spotify, where he built backends, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.

Encore's mission is to simplify and improve the DevOps process, particularly for startups, by automating the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure, aiming to enhance productivity and reduce complexity.

According to Andre Ericsson, the main components of modern DevOps include Terraform for declaratively provisioning infrastructure and Kubernetes, which together form the backbone of most organizational DevOps frameworks.

Encore improves the testing environment setup by automating the provision of cloud infrastructure for testing environments, which can be scaled down and optimized for cost and speed, unlike traditional methods that replicate the production environment.

In the context of Encore, declarative infrastructure means defining the required cloud resources directly within the codebase, enabling Encore to automatically understand and provision the necessary infrastructure for each service.

Encore integrates with tools like Swagger or OpenAPI for documentation, and observability and debugging tools such as Datadog, Grafana, and Sentry.

For local development, Encore offers an automated setup for local environments through the Encore CLI and provides a local development dashboard that showcases service catalogs, API documentation, and observability traces.

Encore's cloud platform automatically provisions all necessary cloud infrastructure for different environments, such as testing and production, including dedicated temporary environments for pull requests to facilitate end-to-end testing.

Encore includes a built-in CI/CD system optimized for fast integration testing, which automatically compiles applications, runs tests, and provisions the necessary infrastructure directly to the user's cloud account.