GAMEON

Hands-on experiment building microservices and cloud native applications

Create a Room service

This game was built to give you reasons to try things, to make it easier (or more interesting) for you to learn the hard way.

Creating a simple microservice that provides a room can take as little as 15 minutes. A simple service must provide a publicly reachable WebSocket endpoint that satisfies the WebSocket protocol, and that’s it for a basic, functional room.

Why are there WebSockets again?

I thought microservices were about REST!

Asynchronous interaction patterns are an important part of microservice architectures. In our case, WebSockets are a stand-in for messaging protocols like MQTT that could be used, but that require much more coordination and setup between parties that don’t know each other all that well (i.e. us and you, the intrepid room writer).

Visits from the Sweep

Registered rooms are visited periodically by the Sweep. The Sweep will score rooms based on on availability, and adherence to the Room API (primarily the WebSocket protocol), as well as other factors like unique room names and descriptions, or the presence of customized items or commands.

Rooms will move in the map based on their score, with high-scoring rooms moving toward the center (closer to First Room), and low-scoring rooms moving toward the periphery.

Let’s get started!

As mentioned above, creating a room (your very own microservice) is straight-up. Your deployment options may vary depending on the language you choose.

Once you have a sample room created and deployed, you’ll register the room’s WebSocket endpoint with the game (essentially a webhook).