Infrastructure provisioning
How Encore provisions infrastructure for your application
Encore automatically provisions all necessary infrastructure, in all environments and across all major cloud providers, without requiring application code changes. You simply connect your cloud account and create an environment.
This is powered by Encore's Backend Framework, which lets you declare infrastructure resources (databases, caches, queues, scheduled jobs, etc.) as type-safe objects in application code.
At compile time, Encore creates an Application Model with a definition of the infrastructure your application requires. Encore then uses this model to provision the infrastructure in both your cloud account, and development and preview environments in Encore Cloud.
The approach removes the need for infrastructure configuration files and avoids creating cloud-specific dependencies in your application.
Having an end-to-end integration between application code and infrastructure also enables Encore to keep environments in sync and track cloud infrastructure, giving you an up-to-date view of your infrastructure to avoid unnecessary cloud costs.
Environment types
By default, Encore provisions infrastructure using contextually appropriate objectives for each environment type. You retain control over the infrastructure in your cloud account, and can configure it directly both via Encore's Cloud Dashboard and your cloud provider's console. Encore takes care of syncing your changes.
| Local | Encore Cloud | GCP / AWS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Environment types: | Development | Preview, Development | Development, Production |
| Objectives: | Provisioning speed | Provisioning speed, Cost* | Reliability, Security, Scalability |
*Encore Cloud is free to use, subject to Fair Use guidelines and usage limits. Learn more
Development Infrastructure
Encore provisions infrastructure resources differently for each type of development environment.
| Local | Preview / Development (Encore Cloud) | GCP / AWS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SQL Databases: | Docker | Encore Managed (Kubernetes), Neon | See production |
| Pub/Sub: | In-memory (NSQ) | GCP Pub/Sub | See production |
| Caches: | In-memory (Redis) | In-memory (Redis) | See production |
| Cron Jobs: | Disabled | Encore Managed | See production |
| Object Storage: | Local Disk | Encore Managed | See production |
Local Development
For local development Encore provisions a combination of Docker and in-memory infrastructure components. SQL Databases are provisioned using Docker. For Pub/Sub and Caching the infrastructure is run in-memory.
When running tests, a separate SQL Database cluster is provisioned that is optimized for high performance (using an in-memory filesystem and fsync disabled) at the expense of reduced reliability.
To avoid surprises during development, Cron Jobs are not triggered in local environments. They can always be triggered manually by calling the API directly from the development dashboard.
The application code itself is compiled and run natively on your machine (without Docker).
Preview Environments
When you've connected your application to GitHub, Encore automatically provisions a temporary Preview Environment for each Pull Request.
Preview Environments are created in Encore Cloud, and are optimized for provisioning speed and cost-effectiveness. The Preview Environment is automatically destroyed when the Pull Request is merged or closed.
Preview Environments are named after the pull request, so PR #72 will create an environment named pr:72.
Encore Cloud
Encore Cloud is a simple, zero-configuration hosting solution provided by Encore. It's perfect for development environments and small-scale use that do not require any specific SLAs. It's also a great way to evaluate Encore without needing to connect your cloud account.
Encore Cloud is not designed for business-critical use and does not offer reliability guarantees for persistent storage like SQL Databases. Other infrastructure primitives like Pub/Sub and Caching are provisioned with small-scale use in mind.
Learn more about the usage limitations
Production Infrastructure
Encore provisions production infrastructure resources using best-practice guidelines and services for each respective cloud provider.
| GCP | AWS | |
|---|---|---|
| Networking: | VPC | VPC |
| Compute: | Cloud Run, GKE | Fargate ECS, EKS |
| SQL Databases: | GCP Cloud SQL, Neon | Amazon RDS, Neon |
| Pub/Sub: | GCP Pub/Sub | Amazon SQS & Amazon SNS |
| Object Storage: | GCS | Amazon S3 |
| Caches: | GCP Memorystore (Redis) | Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) |
| Cron Jobs: | Encore Managed | Encore Managed |
| Secrets: | Secret Manager | AWS Secrets Manager |
Configurability
With Encore you do not define any cloud service specifics in the application code. This means that after deploying, you can safely use your cloud provider's console to modify the provisioned resources, or use the built-in configuration UI in Encore's Cloud Dashboard. Encore takes care of syncing the changes automatically in both directions.
In the future, Encore will offer automated optimization of cloud environments according to your application's real-world behavior.
Process allocation
You can configure how microservices should be deployed on the compute hardware; either deploying all services in one process or one process per service.
It's often recommended to deploy all services in one process in order to reduce costs and minimize response times between services. (But it depends on your use case.) Deploying each service as its own process will improve scalability and decrease blast radius if things go wrong. This is only recommended for production environments.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Encore provisions a single GCP Project for each environment, containing a single Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and a whole slew of miscellaneous resources (IAM roles, policies, subnets, security groups, route tables, and so on). Secrets are stored using Secret Manager.
Compute instances
When using GCP you can decide between Cloud Run (a fully managed infrastructure that scales to zero) or a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster. If you prefer you can also import an existing Kubernetes cluster and have Encore deploy to it.
SQL Databases
When using SQL Databases, Encore provisions a single GCP Cloud SQL cluster, and separate databases within that cluster. The cluster is configured with the latest PostgreSQL version available at the time of provisioning.
The machine type is chosen as the smallest available that supports auto-scaling (1 vCPU / 3.75GiB memory). You can freely increase the machine type yourself to handle larger scales.
Additionally, Encore sets up:
- Automatic daily backups (retained for 7 days) with point-in-time recovery
- Private networking, ensuring the database is only accessible from the VPC
- Mutual TLS encryption for additional security
- High availability mode with automatic failover (via disk replication to multiple zones)
Pub/Sub
When using Pub/Sub, Encore provisions GCP Pub/Sub topics and subscriptions. Additionally, Encore automatically creates and configures dead-letter topics.
Object Storage
When using Object Storage, Encore provisions Google Cloud Storage buckets. Encore also handles fine-grained permission management of per-service storage operations (read, list, write, delete, etc).
Caching
When using Caching, Encore provisions GCP Memorystore for Redis clusters.
The machine type is chosen as the smallest available that supports auto-scaling (5GiB memory, with one read replica). You can freely change the machine type yourself to handle larger scales.
Additionally, Encore sets up:
- Redis authentication
- Transit encryption with TLS for additional security
- A 10% memory buffer to better memory fragmentation, and active defragmentation
Cron Jobs
When using Cron Jobs, Encore Cloud triggers the execution of cron jobs by calling the corresponding API using a signed request so the application can verify the source of the request as coming from Encore's cron functionality. No infrastructure is provisioned for this to work.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Encore provisions a dedicated Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for each environment. It contains an Elastic Container Registry to host Docker images, and a whole slew of miscellaneous resources (IAM roles, policies, subnets, security groups, route tables, and so on). Secrets are stored using Secrets Manager.
Compute instances
Encore provisions a Fargate ECS cluster (managed, serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine) or an Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster.
SQL Databases
When using SQL Databases, Encore provisions a single Amazon RDS cluster, and separate databases within that cluster. The cluster is configured with the latest PostgreSQL version available at the time of provisioning.
The instance type is chosen as the smallest available latest-generation type that supports auto-scaling (currently db.m5.large, with 2 vCPU / 8GiB memory).
You can freely change the instance type yourself to handle larger scales.
Additionally, Encore sets up:
- Automatic daily backups (retained for 7 days) with point-in-time recovery
- Private networking, ensuring the database is only accessible from the VPC
- Dedicated subnets for the database instances, with security group rules to secure them
Pub/Sub
When using Pub/Sub, Encore provisions a combination of Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS topics and subscriptions. Additionally, Encore automatically creates and configures dead-letter topics.
Object Storage
When using Object Storage, Encore provisions Amazon S3 buckets. Encore also handles fine-grained permission management of per-service storage operations (read, list, write, delete, etc).
Caching
When using Caching, Encore provisions Amazon ElastiCache for Redis clusters.
The machine type is chosen as the smallest available that supports auto-scaling (currently cache.m6g.large, with one read replica).
You can freely change the machine type yourself to handle larger scales.
Additionally, Encore sets up:
- Redis ACL authentication
- A replication group, with multi-AZ replication and automatic failover for high availability
- Transit encryption with TLS for additional security
- A 10% memory buffer to better memory fragmentation, and active defragmentation
Cron Jobs
When using Cron Jobs, Encore Cloud triggers the execution of cron jobs by calling the corresponding API using a signed request so the application can verify the source of the request as coming from Encore's cron functionality. No infrastructure is provisioned for this to work.