// the find
GoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo
Sample cloud-first application with 10 microservices showcasing Kubernetes, Istio, and gRPC.
Google's reference implementation of a polyglot microservices architecture, built around a fake e-commerce store with 11 services in Go, C#, Node.js, Python, and Java. It's aimed at teams learning Kubernetes, gRPC, and service mesh patterns, or needing a realistic workload for infrastructure experimentation. Not production code — it's a teaching tool with intentionally mock implementations for payment and shipping.
Each service uses a different language stack, which makes it genuinely useful for testing polyglot build pipelines, image scanning, and mixed-runtime observability. The Kustomize component model is well thought out — you can overlay Istio, Spanner, Memorystore, or AlloyDB independently without forking the base manifests. The proto definitions are shared and consistent across services, so it's a decent reference for how to structure a real gRPC contract. CI is solid: separate workflows for Kustomize build validation, Terraform validate, Helm chart lint, and container builds.
The services don't talk to a shared backing store — each has its own isolated state, so there's no meaningful data consistency story to learn from. The recommendation service is a naive Python list filter, not a real ML model, which misleads anyone hoping to see how you'd actually integrate a model into a microservice. Network policies and mTLS are opt-in kustomize overlays rather than on by default, so the default deployment teaches bad security habits. No local development story that doesn't require either Minikube/Kind setup or a GKE cluster — Skaffold helps but the cold-start experience is rough without GCP credentials.