So I wrote a thing. It’s called Ackal (https://www.ack.al) and it’s a tool for deploying distributed gRPC health checks and monitoring the results using Prometheus-compatible tools.

I’d really like to find 5-10 beta testers who are willing to test Ackal and provide feedback so that I can improve the system before launch. Any help will be really appreciated: reviewing the web content for errors and omissions; testing the system end-to-end; expectations for such a system etc.

I'm interested to better understand how you are health checking your gRPC services.

Testers need not have gRPC services deployed. However, if you want to test your own gRPC services, these must implement the gRPC Health Checking Protocol (https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/health-checking.md) in order to be health-checkable by Ackal.

Testers should be able to run OCI containers locally to access Ackal’s CLI (ackalctl) and a secure proxy (ackalctl-http-proxy) to access service (Prometheus) metrics. I’ve been using Linux for development but would like to have testers on Windows and macOS too.

Testers will need a Google, Microsoft or GitHub account to authenticate. I’m interested to know whether folks would expect to authenticate using Facebook, Twitter or Apple credentials too.

If you’re willing to help, please email info@ack.al. Please let me know whether you’re testing as a personal interest or on behalf of your employer. If, on behalf of your employer, please let me know who that is. I will register an account for you and provide you with the details that you’ll need to proceed.

Until you are registered to use Ackal, you will be unable to use it.

Ackal uses multiple Google Cloud services (Firebase Auth, Firestore, Cloud Run, Kubernetes Engine, kubebuilder etc.) and Stripe for subscriptions.

If there’s interest, I’ll document the experience of developing the system, particularly the split between coding the app and developing everything necessary to support it (Stripe, website, branding, docs etc.).