Introducing Andromeda - My Own Platform

One of my first side projects born out of lockdown, learn more here!

To entertain myself during this pandemic, I set about working on my massive list of side projects. The overall aim was to try and reduce how much I related to that classic meme about side projects and completed a few. So far, I feel like I have been making good progress. I hope to at the end of all of this, show how much I completed over time. A large portion of these projects involve writing code, getting that code deployed and up and running on my own personal cloud account. While I do love configuring things manually from time to time, it can become a barrier to progress.

So, what I decided to do, was look at developing a standard method of supporting the various deployment targets I had in mind, the languages I wanted to write in and so on and so forth. I already talked about in previous posts how I have this sort of foundational infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, so I hoped to leverage this. Inevitably what I ended up doing, was going back to my final year project and looking at it as a concept. I realised I could take the concept a step further and use what I wrote previously as sort of a 1.0 so to speak.

Enter, Andromeda. Every good project needs some form of vague nickname. I am a big fan of astronomy, outer space, all that jazz. Andromeda is one of the galaxies that’s closest to us, if the project is to have all the necessary bolts and pieces to standardise app creation to app deployment, I figured that the name of a galaxy which would contain all the necessary bolts and pieces to have stars, planets, what have you, would work quite well. The project will have various subcomponents, just to make things easier to understand. The hope is to essentially develop a 2.0 of my final years project concept and eventually a 3.0 which would sort of achieve the ultimate aims of the project.

As of today, the following components are in production at their 1.0 versions, with some on 1.X versions

• Andromeda – Containers
• Andromeda – Functions
• Andromeda – Build & Deploy

Additional features planned to be supported include

• Compute
• Databases
• Storage
• Networking

I will be writing about the components that are in production today, very soon. The hope is to achieve 1.0’s by summers end and continue to migrate various existing items I have in production today to the Andromeda model. Eventually, I wish to start on the next major versions of these components to allow for API based operations as versus the current, shell script-based approach. So, watch this space!