
Show HN: NStack – Typed, composable microservices for data analytics - NickPollard
https://github.com/nstack/nstack
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pea
Hey guys, I'm Leo - one of the founders of NStack.

We started work on NStack around a year ago, to help data-scientists
productionise their models and compose them together with various data
sources.

We built NStack using a mixture of low-level Linux technology, including
systemd-containers, btrfs, dbus IPC, along with high-level concepts such as
building a DSL, type-checker, and runtime. As a functional programming
company, NStack is built using Haskell and are really excited to launch our
CLI and server -- along with a sandboxed demo PaaS which you can try out now.

We'd love to hear any feedback.

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adam_ellsworth
What are some good resources on better understanding composability?

~~~
NickPollard
We have some info on our docs here:
[https://docs.nstack.com/en/latest/features/index.html](https://docs.nstack.com/en/latest/features/index.html)
(See the composition section at the top).

Composition is a simple technique to build functions out of multiple simpler
functions. It's heavily used in Functional programming but we think it's
really useful for everyone, particularly data workers who might be gluing
together lots of different modules/libraries/systems. We also use types to
help check that functions can compose - this can catch schema mismatch errors
early rather than waiting until you run your data pipeline to realise that the
output of one function isn't _quite_ what your second function expects.

Wikipedia as some more detailed info on function composition:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_composition_(computer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_composition_\(computer_science\))

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d--b
This looks great. It seems like it's a great open source alternative to all
these big software vendors like dataiku.

kudos.

