The Rough Guide to Java RPC Frameworks

Distributed computing is here to stay, and more and more Java developers are exploring the ecosystem of available remote procedure call (RPC) frameworks for building distributed applications or microservices. However, which RPC framework suits you best?

This presentation will cover the characteristics and usage of different RPC frameworks (e.g. Netty, gRPC, Aeron/SBE, KryoNet, Apache Thrift) via a practical real-life use case. For this presentation, the use case will be providing remote polyglot access to Infinispan, which is an in-memory data grid platform from Red Hat. Since 2010 it has offered remote access via a custom protocol. During this talk we will explore how to re-implement this custom protocol using multiple RPC frameworks. So, you will be to see first hand how these RPC frameworks behave, the necessary steps to get started with them, and learn how you can apply them in your project.

Transcript

1. THE ROUGH GUIDE TO JAVA RPC FRAMEWORKS 1 4 t h M a r c h 2 0 1 8 G A L D E R Z A M A R R E Ñ O A R R I Z A B A L A G A 1 @ g a l d e r z
2. D I S T R I B U T E D C O M P U T I N G I S H E R E TO S TAY . . . 2 @ g a l d e r z
3. SCALABILITY run multiple instances to meet demand ELASTICITY scale up/down without downtime RESILIENT handle failure transparently SPEED OF CHANGE evolve parts independently DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING GIVES US... 3 flickr.com/photos/ministerio_tic/6812435353 @ g a l d e r z
4. 4 static.pexels.com/photos/158163/clouds-cloudporn-weather- flickr.com/photos/aidanwojtas/34885389822
5. COMPONENTS TALKING TO EACH OTHER e.g. server / server A A X Y e.g. client / server 5 @ g a l d e r z
6. 6 LEARN HOW COMPONENTS CAN TALK TO EACH OTHER OVER THE NETWORK @ g a l d e r z
7. 7 CONSIDERING OTHER LANGUAGES TOO... @ g a l d e r z
8. W H Y A M I TA L K I N G A B O U T T H I S ? 8 @ g a l d e r z
9. @galderz s i n ce 2 0 0 6 S O F T WA R E E N G I N E E R co m m u n i t y a n d c l i e n t / s e r ve r l e a d I N F I N I S PA N C O - F O U N D E R ( 2 0 0 9 ) M U D K I P R O C K S ! 9 @ g a l d e r z
10. D ATA C A C H E T E M P O R A R Y D ATA expensive to retrieve or hard to calculate data that needs surviving in case of failure E V E N T B R O K E R & A N A L Y T I C S I N - M E M O R Y S TO R E D I S T R I B U T E D key / value store linearly scalable db, cassandra, file...etc C A N P E R S I S T 10 @ g a l d e r z
11. to distribute data around pluggable architecture with these as main options internal use only S E R V E R - TO - S E R V E R O V E R J G R O U P S U D P O R TC P U S E R S O N L Y S E E C O N F I G U R AT I O N 11 @ g a l d e r z
12. 12 EMBEDDED 2009 REMOTE 2010 @ g a l d e r z
13. HTTP 1.x REST API G E T / { c a c h e N a m e } / { c a c h e K e y } P U T / { c a c h e N a m e } / { c a c h e K e y } D E L E T E / { c a c h e N a m e } / { c a c h e K e y } 13 @ g a l d e r z
14. GOOD H T T P 1 . x R E S T A P I easy to learn, easy to debug D E S C R I P T I V E easily accessible from any language U N I V E R S A L L Y A C C E S S I B L E BAD H T T P 1 . x R E S T A P I text data takes much more bandwidth parsing expensive I N E F F I C I E N T P R O T O C O L as a result of sending parallel requests C O N N E C T I O N E X H A U S T I O N processing a request needs to finish before starting with next one P R O C E S S O N E R E Q U E S T AT T I M E 14 @ g a l d e r z
15. BINARY PROTOCOL Y O U C A N W R I T E H E R E H O T R O D less bytes sent, zig-zag encoding B E T T E R N E T W O R K E F F I C I E N C Y avoid extra hoops H A S H I N G - AWA R E R O U T I N G automatically adjust topologies as nodes join or leave D Y N A M I C TO P O L O G I E S 15 @ g a l d e r z
16. NETTY used to develop protocol servers and clients N I O C L I E N T / S E R V E R F R A M E W O R K allows for clear separation of concerns F L E X I B L E & E X T E N S I B L E E V E N T M O D E L simplifies and streamlines developing TCP or UDP servers E A S Y N E T W O R K P R O G R A M M I N G 16 @ g a l d e r z P O W E R I N G O U R B I N A R Y P R O TOCO L
17. GOOD N E T T Y can handle any type of load P E R F O R M A N C E & S C A L A B I L I T Y e.g. heavily used at Apple H U G E C O M M U N I T Y keep your dependencies simple N O A D D I T I O N A L D E P E N D E N C I E S BAD N E T T Y mitigated with binary serialization libraries M A N U A L E N C O D I N G 17 @ g a l d e r z
18. IMMATURE apache thrift - incubator version 0.2 message pack - version 0.3 BOUNDED BY THE TOOL limit yourself to languages supported by tool L E A R N M O R E 18 LACKING STREET CREDIBILITY google protocol buffers NETWORK LAYER NOT COVERED you still have to write all the network layer in each target language 2010: PORTABLE SERIALIZATION @ g a l d e r z
19. L A G S B E H I N D B U T P O P U L A R not as much attention as binary particularly for those using languages not covered by binary 1 1 N E W V E R S I O N S 1 2 N E W O P E R AT I O N S both fixes and new operations total of 32 operations java client is reference one, others always lagging a bit behind J AVA , C + + / C # , N O D E 19 BINARY HTTP 8 YEARS ON... @ g a l d e r z
20. A D D I N G N E W O P E R AT I O N S R E Q U I R E S A L O T O F E F F O R T 20 @ g a l d e r z
21. MORE OPERATIONS MORE QUICKLY MORE EFFICIENTLY MAINTAIN SAME PERFORMANCE L E A R N M O R E 21 MODERNISING INFINISPAN REMOTE @ g a l d e r z
22. simple and easy to use backed by years of experience with Stubby can work across languages S I M P L E & I D I O M AT I C P E R F O R M A N T & S C A L A B L E I N T E R O P E R A B L E & E X T E N S I B L E 22 @ g a l d e r z
23. message definition portable message encoding mechanism, supporting: C++, Objective-C, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Go, C#, Java binary protocol - no more text native stream support stream multiplexing - single connection header compression - saves more bandwidth I D L P R O TO B U F 3 H T T P / 2 23 @ g a l d e r z
24. L E T ' S S E E T H I S . . . 24 @ g a l d e r z
25. HASH-AWARE ROUTING Y O U C A N W R I T E H E R E W I T H G R P C configurable C L I E N T - S I D E L O A D B A L A N C I N G so that SubchannelPicker can do its job A D D K E Y A S H T T P H E A D E R inspects HTTP headers and can decide which channel to send data through S U B C H A N N E L P I C K E R 25 @ g a l d e r z
26. T I T L E S T R E A M R E C O R D I N G M O N I TO R & D E B U G archive recording for later replay designed so that internal state can be observed at runtime Apache License 2.0 O P E N S O U R C E M E S S A G E T R A N S P O R T H I G H P E R F O R M A N C E UDP and IPC transports highest throughput with lowest and most predictable latency schema driven source code generation J AVA , C + + , . N E T 26 @ g a l d e r z
27. T I T L E S I N G L E W R I T E R U N S H A R E D S TAT E apply it everywhere prefer it where possible avoid unnecessary copies AV O I D C O P I E S G A R B A G E F R E E S M A R T B ATC H I N G in the message path in the message path N I O & L O C K - F R E E 27 in steady state running @ g a l d e r z
28. AERON ARCHITECTURE Y O U C A N W R I T E H E R E p u b l i s h e r s s e n d m e s s a g e s t h a t S u b s c r i b e r s co n s u m e U N I D I R E C T I O N A L U D P , I P C , I n f i n i b a n d d e t a i l s h a n d l e d by m e d i a d r i ve r M E D I A - S P E C I F I C m e d i a d r i ve r a s s e p a ra t e p r o ce s s t o avo i d c l i e n t s i d e G C S E PA R AT E P R O C E S S 28 @ g a l d e r z
29. L E T ' S S E E T H I S . . . 29 @ g a l d e r z
30. WHEN TO USE WHAT? Y O U C A N W R I T E H E R E you get more control but more code to write A E R O N I S L O W L E V E L ( ~ N E T T Y ) payload & network code generated for multiple languages A E R O N I S P O R TA B L E ( ~ g R P C ) congested networks or clients go across a WAN I F TC P N E E D E D : N E T T Y o r g R P C aeron specifically designed for this - no TCP support I F C L I E N T S I N L A N : A E R O N data centre workloads, e.g. P2P nodes within a LAN A E R O N G O O D F O R S E R V E R - S E R V E R beats even commercial offerings A E R O N F O R U L T I M AT E P E R F O R M A N C E C O M P A R I S O N 30 @ g a l d e r z
31. ”THE BEST TEMPLATE EVER” Y O U C A N W R I T E H E R E A company is an association or collection of individuals, whether natural persons, legal persons, or a mixture of both. Company members share a common purpose and unite in order to focus their various. 31 github.com/benalexau/rpc-bench @ g a l d e r z
32. ”THE BEST TEMPLATE EVER” Y O U C A N W R I T E H E R E A company is an association or collection of individuals, whether natural persons, legal persons, or a mixture of both. Company members share a common purpose and unite in order to focus their various. 32 github.com/benalexau/rpc-bench @ g a l d e r z
33. LESSONS LEARNT (SO FAR) Y O U C A N W R I T E H E R E what is the lowest common denominator? N O N E E D C O D E G E N E R AT E D I N A L L L A N G U A G E S aeron is a strong candidate but we don't control clients F O R I N F I N I S PA N , P R O B A B L Y G R P C 33 @ g a l d e r z C or a more typesafe language that can create C bindings (e.g. Haskell?) if JNI goes away (project panama), maybe Java can call into C J AVA A N D C S H O U L D B E E N O U G H
34. C R E D I T S 34 @ g a l d e r z
35. THANK YOU i n f i n i s p a n . o r g I N F I N I S PA N n e t t y . i o N E T T Y g r p c . i o G R P C g i t h u b . co m / r e a l - l o g i c / a e r o n A E R O N 35 g i t h u b . co m / g a l d e r z / r p c s @ g a l d e r z