We've been talking about tailored service templates ever since we first identified microservices as a thing. If an organization sets out to create a collection of small services that can be developed, built, deployed and operated independently but consistently, it makes sense to give teams a solid starting point that aligns to the standard. However, one of the enduring problems with that approach is that as the template evolves over time in response to changing technical and business requirements, projects based on older versions of the template fall out of date. Retrofitting template improvements into an established project becomes a major pain. Cruft attempts to address this problem by providing tools to identify and patch differences between a local project and the current head of a master template repository. It combines the Cookiecutter templating engine with git hashes to identify and apply changes to the templates. Think of it as a package manager for a project boilerplate. Keeping templates up-to-date is a notoriously difficult and long-standing problem, so to us the solution Cruft provides sounds almost too good to be true. Based on early feedback from our team, however, Cruft actually works and makes life easier for service builders and maintainers. We're anxious to see how it performs over the long term, but for now it's worth taking a look at this potentially useful tool.
