Ferris FX

The following section provides a short overview of key features of Ferris FX.

Ferris FX is a platform for building highly scalable, cross-network sync or async microservices and agents.

The unique low learning curve approach significantly reduces the cost of deploying enterprise wide process and integration pipelines across disparate systems at a speed. While at the same time creating a platform with practically unbound access and ease of integration.

FX is a ground-up rethink of how both sync and async microservices are built in multi-cloud, highly volatile and fragmented software environments.

On FX you are effectively writing large applications by connecting “blocks” of code (Services) through Events. An approach that is highly intuitive and in line with iterative agile practices.

The following is a brief review of some of the benefits and features of Ferris FX. Upcoming features are shown in italics.

Quality Description
Low Learning Curve Developers can practically learn within an hour how to work with FX.
Highly Scalable Built from ground-up for scalability. The event messaging core is based on an Apache Kafka backbone, that can transmit millions of jobs per day to any number of Services without break.
Resource Efficient FX Microservices are deployed in real time as Events comes in. There are not 100s of microservice containers running on your platform. Just three (3) components. The Ferris Management UI, The Event Router and any number Executors.
Plug into anything. Practically Limitless Integrations Utilize the extensive library functionalities offered by Python, with the potential addition of Java, DOTNET, or GoLang in the near future. Avoid being solely reliant on paid pre-packaged modules that follow rigid structures, involve complex building processes, and may result in vendor lock-in.
Combined Support for Sync and Async Microservices Manage both your Async and Sync Service Mesh in a single interface without any expensive and cumbersome 3rd party system. Reduce the complexity of your infrastructure and the number of components.
Fully Containerised and Easy to Deploy Pre-packaged Kubernetes Templates with minimal customisation requirements fit straight into your enterprise Kubernetes (and if you dont have one we will build you one). Run in 1 command and Scale as you wish.
All Ops Data in one (1) Secure place We record all events, logs, alerts in Kafka and store them in daily index within Elasticsearch for easy search and loading it into other systems such as Splunk, DataDog, LogTrail etc. A single scalable fault tolerant system to transport events and operational data.
Monitor Performance All Service Executions are continuously tracked and recorded by FX allowing you to easily identify bottlenecks in your processing. Execution details can be viewed on the UI or within Kibana/Elasticsearch.
Enterprise Friendly User and Project Management FX can be easily plugged into your identity infrastructure, whether OIDC or AD or SAML, all of them are supported. Packages are organised by Projects enabling users to have specific roles and simplify oversight and governance of your platform. Further enhanced by tagging support promoting an enterprise wide shared semantics and Taxonomy of packages.
Structured Service Documentation Provide a readme.md file with your package to document it for users. Provide an OpenAPI document to automatically expose the end point and document it for users. Provide a manifest JSON file for describing package.
Developer Friendly GIT integration A seamless integration into GIT that fits straight into existing development and deployment flow. Push to git to activate code. No more, No Less.
Simple Standard and Powerful Event Format Based on Cloud Events the FX event format is Simple JSON, familiar to every developer. If you know how to read JSON you can build a Microservice.
Simple Easy to Understand and use Conventions A Microservice consists of a set of scripts run in sequence, receives events as JSON and sends events as JSON. Use a config.json to store configs, and use a secrets.json to store secrets. Store files in /tmp. You can use any Python libraries and also deploy your won packages with each service.
Selective Feature Support Our ‘Everything is Optional’ approach to the convetions support by services means that developers can incrementally improve the quality of their code as they get more familiar with the system. A base service is just a single script and then they can build up to support configurations, UI, reusable packages, published interface packages or custom image execution.
Support for Enterprise Specific Library Distributions Package Enterprise Specific Libraries into the base executor for use by all executors within the enterprise. Saving significant amounts of development time.
Real Time Code Updates The FX near real time deploy means code changes are immediately active.
Run A/B Testing with Ease Plug different code versions to the same event to evaluate and measure different outcomes.
Run Anything with K8X The unique RUN ANYTHING architecture further breaks boundaries of running polyglot container systems. Simply tell the system on which image a code is to execute.
Activate or Deactivate Services in Realtime Services can be activated or deactivated upon demand.
Instant Scaling Simply increase the number of Router or Executor replicas to process faster (provided your underlying services can support it)
View Logs in Realtime View the Logs of any execution in real time, directly on the Management UI.
View Event Dependencies Easily Have an error? Trace easily the events which led to the Error with all the parameters used to run the event flow.
UI Support for Microservices Drop in a metadata.json file to auto generate UIs for entering parameters for a specific package.
Easy Aggregated Logging All services logs are aggregated and searchable and viewable in real time. Developers can log easily.
Adaptive Event Schema FX is continuously scanning the incoming events to populate the event catalog and their schema. Making it easier for developers to write services which react to the platform events. Continuously updating you on the Events within your platform.
Parallel Event Processing and Flows The same Event can be sent to multiple services for processing. Enabling multiple flows to be triggered.
Anonymous and Published Interfaces Services can easily standardise and publish their interfaces making them available in the ‘No-Code’ flows.
Event Mapping Easily map parameters of one event to another event. Allowing you to easily link event flows together.
Event Tagging Tag events, enabling an easy organisation of event groups by domain.
Execution Prioritisation and Cancellation Granular queue management to prioritise or cancel specific executions if there is a backlog.
Modular Easily Extendible UI Add modular custom UIs to the management interface using FX extensions to the Flask App Builder for creating a custom Management UI.
Architecture Overview

An comprehensive overview of the architecture of Ferris FX.

Developer Guide

This Developer Guide provides step by step guidance to setting up Ferris locally, building microservices and runninung code snippets as well as entire services.


Last modified November 24, 2023: update (f4bc5ea)