Unison Cloud Goes Open Source Under MIT License

Unison Cloud, the distributed computing platform built around the Unison programming language, is now open source under the MIT license. The release covers four projects that together make up the platform.

What Is Unison Cloud?

Unison Cloud turns any pool of nodes into a distributed computer programmable with the Unison language. According to the project, services deploy in seconds and are lightweight, coming in under 200kb, which removes the need to build and ship multi-GB containers. The platform offers fast, typed inter-service communication using adaptive service graph compression, distributed batch jobs based on a high-level fork/join style model, transactional storage backed by DynamoDB, object storage backed by S3, secrets management, and long-running background jobs.

Four Projects Released

The Unison Cloud client defines the programming model for a cluster and includes both a local interpreter for testing and local development and the real interpreter that talks to a distributed Unison cluster. The project notes this component has been open source for a long time. Nimbus, the worker node for a Unison Cloud cluster, is written in Unison and supports any number of workers that can be scaled dynamically up or down. The Unison Cloud API Server is a Haskell service that the client talks to when interacting with a remote cluster, and it also acts as a control plane for tracking cluster membership and handling authentication. The Unison Cloud UI is the code behind app.unison.cloud, used for viewing deployed services, logs, and more. Nimbus, the API server, and the UI are newly open sourced.

Availability and Support

The team says it believes the technology will be more useful to the world as an open source project and hopes people build great things with it. Professional support for a Unison Cloud cluster is available by contacting [email protected].

Sources: Lobsters