Lately we decided to promote Spawn from eigr-labs to the main eigr github organization: https://github.com/eigr/spawn. At the same time we archived the massa proxy repository and explained our motivation behind it.
It has been three years ago when we met in a new open source community while we tried to make a then shiny new project successful–https://cloudstate.io/. While we've discovered and also implemented a communications procotol for a multitude of programming languages, we constantly iterated on ideas how to build a system that is able to scale and also being usable on many places not only on backend services. At the time we discovered the serverless space, having also solved the stateful aspect of it by using a then promising new procotol and concept called Cloudstate. After some re-priorization with the project as a whole, the core OSS community moved on to build eigr.io and discover our ideas under this new umbrella organization https://eigr.io/.
The Actor Mesh
Over the last couple of months, Spawn has been shaped by our vision to have a simpler and more focused way to bring an actor system to a polyglot environment, where the way of how components can interact like Actors and Processes do, is not that well known in other languages. eigr/Massa always was about to solve the challenge of stateful serverless, like it took the vision from its originating project. But at the same time Massa also tried always to solve two things at the same time. Building a polyglot serverless runtime and also solve the aspect of statefull serverless has been sometimes being too much at the same time. Spawn is a focused effort to solve one problem first, and then, being enabled to build the stateful aspect of serverless on top of it. In this regard, we focus now on something that is that enabler and perhaps one for other problems to solve.
This has been the work of ours lead by Adriano with help from Wesley and Elias; beside that I was able to participate a bit in discussions and presenting our project a two occasions over the last year. I'm looking forward to see Spawn growing into something really cool, special and useful. There is still a lot of work ahead of us and we're very exited to see how we can collaborate and grow as a project.
The Future of Eigr is based on Spawn
We are 100% focused on making Spawn a robust, scalable, dynamic and expandable platform, taking us far beyond what we imagined we were capable of in the initial Cloudstate project and with our previous implementation of Massa. Massa has served us brilliantly as a means of experimentation, and now I feel deeply that we are ready to accomplish whatever we set out to do.
We invite everyone who is here to download and try Spawn and that we are ready to welcome those who want to contribute, whether with doubts, suggestions, a little code is also welcome, or a text review, any contribution is welcome. We greatly admire all of you who are interested in our project.