Using Microsoft’s YARP project to proxy web-based microservices
Inner source is the idea of using open source techniques to develop internal tools, using platforms such as GitHub for collaboration. Engineers across a company identify common issues and technologies and work together to build a single solution to all their problems. It’s an important technique that can significantly reduce duplicate effort. One major bank went from using more than 10 versions of a grid control to just one.
But what happens to a mature inner source project that could be beneficial outside the organization that created it? Some remain behind closed doors, but others make the leap to open source. That’s the case with Microsoft’s YARP, a project that began with the aim of consolidating multiple reverse proxy projects across the company. Its name is an acronym for Yet Another Reverse Proxy, since many teams were already building and using various proxies or looking for APIs and libraries they could use.