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You Cannot Have Exactly-Once Delivery

I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by following in the footsteps of others. In retrospect, it shouldn’t be surprising that folks buy into these fallacies as I once did, but it can be frustrating when trying to communicate certain design decisions and constraints.

Within the context of a distributed system, you cannot have exactly-once message delivery. Web browser and server? Distributed. Server and database? Distributed. Server and message queue? Distributed. You cannot have exactly-once delivery semantics in any of these situations.

As I’ve described in the past, distributed systems are all about trade-offs. This is one of them. There are essentially three types of delivery semantics: at-most-once, at-least-once, and exactly-once. Of the three, the first two are feasible and widely used. If you want to be super anal, you might say at-least-once delivery is also impossible because, technically speaking, network partitions are not strictly time-bound. If the connection from you to the server is interrupted indefinitely, you can’t deliver anything. Practically speaking, you have bigger fish to fry at that point—like calling your ISP—so we consider at-least-once delivery, for all intents and purposes, possible. With this model of thinking, network partitions are finitely bounded in time, however arbitrary this may be.

So where does the trade-off come into play, and why is exactly-once delivery impossible? The answer lies in the Two Generals thought experiment or the more generalized Byzantine Generals Problem, which I’ve looked at extensively. We must also consider the FLP result, which basically says, given the possibility of a faulty process, it’s impossible for a system of processes to agree on a decision.

In the letter I mail you, I ask you to call me once you receive it. You never do. Either you really didn’t care for my letter or it got lost in the mail. That’s the cost of doing business. I can send the one letter and hope you get it, or I can send 10 letters and assume you’ll get at least one of them. The trade-off here is quite clear (postage is expensive!), but sending 10 letters doesn’t really provide any additional guarantees. In a distributed system, we try to guarantee the delivery of a message by waiting for an acknowledgement that it was received, but all sorts of things can go wrong. Did the message get dropped? Did the ack get dropped? Did the receiver crash? Are they just slow? Is the network slow? Am I slow? FLP and the Two Generals Problem are not design complexities, they are impossibility results.

People often bend the meaning of “delivery” in order to make their system fit the semantics of exactly-once, or in other cases, the term is overloaded to mean something entirely different. State-machine replication is a good example of this. Atomic broadcast protocols ensure messages are delivered reliably and in order. The truth is, we can’t deliver messages reliably and in order in the face of network partitions and crashes without a high degree of coordination. This coordination, of course, comes at a cost (latency and availability), while still relying on at-least-once semantics. Zab, the atomic broadcast protocol which lays the foundation for ZooKeeper, enforces idempotent operations.

State changes are idempotent and applying the same state change multiple times does not lead to inconsistencies as long as the application order is consistent with the delivery order. Consequently, guaranteeing at-least once semantics is sufficient and simplifies the implementation.

“Simplifies the implementation” is the authors’ attempt at subtlety. State-machine replication is just that, replicating state. If our messages have side effects, all of this goes out the window.

We’re left with a few options, all equally tenuous. When a message is delivered, it’s acknowledged immediately before processing. The sender receives the ack and calls it a day. However, if the receiver crashes before or during its processing, that data is lost forever. Customer transaction? Sorry, looks like you’re not getting your order. This is the worldview of at-most-once delivery. To be honest, implementing at-most-once semantics is more complicated than this depending on the situation. If there are multiple workers processing tasks or the work queues are replicated, the broker must be strongly consistent (or CP in CAP theorem parlance) so as to ensure a task is not delivered to any other workers once it’s been acked. Apache Kafka uses ZooKeeper to handle this coordination.

On the other hand, we can acknowledge messages after they are processed. If the process crashes after handling a message but before acking (or the ack isn’t delivered), the sender will redeliver. Hello, at-least-once delivery. Furthermore, if you want to deliver messages in order to more than one site, you need an atomic broadcast which is a huge burden on throughput. Fast or consistent. Welcome to the world of distributed systems.

Every major message queue in existence which provides any guarantees will market itself as at-least-once delivery. If it claims exactly-once, it’s because they are lying to your face in hopes that you will buy it or they themselves do not understand distributed systems. Either way, it’s not a good indicator.

RabbitMQ attempts to provide guarantees along these lines:

When using confirms, producers recovering from a channel or connection failure should retransmit any messages for which an acknowledgement has not been received from the broker. There is a possibility of message duplication here, because the broker might have sent a confirmation that never reached the producer (due to network failures, etc). Therefore consumer applications will need to perform deduplication or handle incoming messages in an idempotent manner.

The way we achieve exactly-once delivery in practice is by faking it. Either the messages themselves should be idempotent, meaning they can be applied more than once without adverse effects, or we remove the need for idempotency through deduplication. Ideally, our messages don’t require strict ordering and are commutative instead. There are design implications and trade-offs involved with whichever route you take, but this is the reality in which we must live.

Rethinking operations as idempotent actions might be easier said than done, but it mostly requires a change in the way we think about state. This is best described by revisiting the replicated state machine. Rather than distributing operations to apply at various nodes, what if we just distribute the state changes themselves? Rather than mutating state, let’s just report facts at various points in time. This is effectively how Zab works.

Imagine we want to tell a friend to come pick us up. We send him a series of text messages with turn-by-turn directions, but one of the messages is delivered twice! Our friend isn’t too happy when he finds himself in the bad part of town. Instead, let’s just tell him where we are and let him figure it out. If the message gets delivered more than once, it won’t matter. The implications are wider reaching than this, since we’re still concerned with the ordering of messages, which is why solutions like commutative and convergent replicated data types are becoming more popular. That said, we can typically solve this problem through extrinsic means like sequencing, vector clocks, or other partial-ordering mechanisms. It’s usually causal ordering that we’re after anyway. People who say otherwise don’t quite realize that there is no now in a distributed system.

To reiterate, there is no such thing as exactly-once delivery. We must choose between the lesser of two evils, which is at-least-once delivery in most cases. This can be used to simulate exactly-once semantics by ensuring idempotency or otherwise eliminating side effects from operations. Once again, it’s important to understand the trade-offs involved when designing distributed systems. There is asynchrony abound, which means you cannot expect synchronous, guaranteed behavior. Design for failure and resiliency against this asynchronous nature.

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If State Is Hell, SOA Is Satan

More and more companies are describing their success stories regarding the switch to a service-oriented architecture. As with any technological upswing, there’s a clear and palpable hype factor involved (Big Data™ or The Cloud™ anyone?), but obviously it’s not just puff.

While microservices and SOA have seen a staggering rate of adoption in recent years, the mindset of developers often seems to be stuck in the past. I think this is, at least in part, because we seek a mental model we can reason about. It’s why we build abstractions in the first place. In a sense, I would argue there’s a comparison to be made between the explosion of OOP in the early 90’s and today’s SOA trend. After all, SOA is as much about people scale as it is about workload scale, so it makes sense from an organizational perspective.

The Perils of Good Abstractions

While systems are becoming more and more distributed, abstractions are attempting to make them less and less complex. Mesosphere is a perfect example of this, attempting to provide the “datacenter operating system.” Apache Mesos allows you to “program against your datacenter like it’s a single pool of resources.” It’s an appealing proposition to say the least. PaaS like Google App Engine and Heroku offer similar abstractions—write your code without thinking about scale. The problem is you absolutely have to think about scale or you’re bound to run into problems down the road. And while these abstractions are nice, they can be dangerous just the same. Welcome to the perils of good abstractions.

I like to talk about App Engine because I have firsthand experience with it. It’s an easy sell for startups. It handles spinning up instances when you need them, turning them down when you don’t. It’s your app server, database, caching, job scheduler, task queue all in one, and it does it at scale. There’s vendor lock-in, sure, yet it means no ops, no sysadmins, no overhead. Push to deploy. But it’s a leaky abstraction. It has to be. App Engine scales because it’s distributed, but it allows—no, encourages—you to write your system as a monolith. The datastore, memcache, and task queue accesses are masked as RPCs. This is great for our developer mental model, but it will bite you if you’re not careful. App Engine imposes certain limitations to encourage good design; for instance, front-end requests and datastore calls are limited to 60 seconds (it used to be much less), but the leakiness goes beyond that.

RPC is consistently at odds with distributed systems. I would go so far as to say it’s an anti-pattern in many cases. RPC encourages writing synchronous code, but distributed systems are inherently asynchronous. The network is not reliable. The network is not fast. The network is not your friend. Developers who either don’t understand this or don’t realize what’s happening when they make an RPC will write code as if they were calling a function. It will sure as hell look like just calling a function. When we think synchronously, we end up with systems that are slow, fault intolerant, and generally not scalable. To be quite honest, however, this is perfectly acceptable for 90% of startups as they are getting off the ground because they don’t have workloads at meaningful scale.

There’s certainly some irony here. One of the selling points of App Engine is its ability to scale to large amounts of traffic, yet the vast majority of startups would be perfectly suited to scaling up rather than out, perhaps with some failover in place for good measure. Stack Overflow is the poster child of scale-up architecture. In truth, your architecture should be a function of your access patterns, not the other way around (and App Engine is very much tailored to a specific set of access patterns). Nonetheless, it shows that vertical scaling can work. I would bet a lot of startups could sufficiently run on a large, adequately specced machine or maybe a small handful of them.

The cruel irony is that once you hit a certain scale with App Engine, both in terms of your development organization and user base, you’ve reached a point where you have to migrate off it. And if your data model isn’t properly thought out, you will without a doubt hit scale problems. It’s to the point where you need someone with deep knowledge of how App Engine works in order to build quality systems on it. Good luck hiring a team of engineers who understand it. GAE is great at accelerating you to 100 mph, but you better have some nice airbags for the brick wall it launches you into. In fairness, this is a problem every org hits—Conway’s law is very much a reality and every startup has growing pains. To be clear, this isn’t a jab at GAE, which is actually very effective at accelerating a product using little capital and can sustain long-term success given the right use case. Instead, I use it to illustrate a point.

Peering Through the Abstraction

Eventually SOA makes sense, but our abstractions can cause problems if we don’t understand what’s going on behind the curtain (hence the leakiness). Partial failure is all but guaranteed, and latency, partitioning, and other network pressure happens all the time.

Ken Arnold is famed with once saying “state is hell” in reference to designing distributed systems. In the past, I’ve written how scaling shared data is hard, but with SOA it’s practically a requirement. Ken is right though—state is hell, and SOA is fundamentally competing with consistency. The FLP Impossibility result and the CAP theorem can prove it formally, but really this should be intuitively obvious if we accept the laws of physics.

On the other hand, if you store information that I can’t reconstruct, then a whole host of questions suddenly surface. One question is, “Are you now a single point of failure?” I have to talk to you now. I can’t talk to anyone else. So what happens if you go down?

To deal with that, you could be replicated. But now you have to worry about replication strategies. What if I talk to one replicant and modify some data, then I talk to another? Is that modification guaranteed to have already arrived there? What is the replication strategy? What kind of consistency do you need—tight or loose? What happens if the network gets partitioned and the replicants can’t talk to each other? Can anybody proceed?

Essentially, the more stateful your system is, the harder it’s going to be to scale it because distributing that state introduces a rich tapestry of problems. In practice, we often can’t eliminate state wholesale, but basically everything that can be stateless should be stateless.

Making servers disposable allows you a great deal of flexibility. Former Netflix Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft articulates this idea well:

You want to think of servers like cattle, not pets. If you have a machine in production that performs a specialized function, and you know it by name, and everyone gets sad when it goes down, it’s a pet. Instead you should think of your servers like a herd of cows. What you care about is how many gallons of milk you get. If one day you notice you’re getting less milk than usual, you find out which cows aren’t producing well and replace them.

This is effectively how App Engine achieves its scalability. With lightweight, stateless, and disposable instances, it can spin them up and down on the fly without worrying about being in an invalid state.

App Engine also relies on eventual consistency as the default model for datastore interactions. This makes queries fast and highly available, while snapshot isolation can be achieved using entity-group transactions if necessary. The latter, of course, can result in a lot of contention and latency. Yet, people seem to have a hard time grappling with the reality of eventual consistency in distributed systems. State is hell, but calling SOA “satan” is clearly a hyperbole. It is a tough problem nevertheless.

A State of Mind

In the situations where we need state, we have to reconcile with the realities of distributed systems. This means understanding the limitations and accepting the complexities, not papering over them. It doesn’t mean throwing away abstractions. Fortunately, distributed computing is the focus of a lot of great research, so there are primitives with which we can build: immutability, causal ordering, eventual consistency, CRDTs, and other ideas.

As long as we recognize the trade-offs, we can design around them. The crux is knowing they exist in the first place. We can’t have ACID semantics while remaining highly available, but we can use Highly Available Transactions to provide strong-enough guarantees. At the same time, not all operations require coordination or concurrency control. The sooner we view eventual consistency as a solution and not a consequence, the sooner we can let go of this existential crisis. Other interesting research includes BOOM, which seeks to provide a high-level, declarative approach to distributed programming.

State might be hell, but it’s a hell we have to live. I don’t advocate an all-out microservice architecture for a company just getting its start. The complications far outweigh any benefits to be gained, but it becomes a necessity at a certain point. The key is having an exit strategy. PaaS providers make this difficult due to vendor lock-in and architectural constraints. Weigh their advantages carefully.

Once you do transition to a SOA, make as many of those services, or the pieces backing them, as stateless as possible. For those which aren’t stateless, know that the problem typically isn’t novel. These problems have been solved or are continuing to be solved in new and interesting ways. Academic research is naturally at the bleeding edge with industry often lagging behind. OOP concepts date back to as early as the 60’s but didn’t gain widespread adoption until several decades later. Distributed computing is no different. SOA is just a state of mind.

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Fast, Scalable Networking in Go with Mangos

In the past, I’ve looked at nanomsg and why it’s a formidable alternative to the well-regarded ZeroMQ. Like ZeroMQ, nanomsg is a native library which markets itself as a way to build fast and scalable networking layers. I won’t go into detail on how nanomsg accomplishes this since my analysis of it already covers that fairly extensively, but instead I want to talk about a Go implementation of the protocol called Mangos. ((Full disclosure: I am a contributor on the Mangos project, but only because I was a user first!)) If you’re not familiar with nanomsg or Scalability Protocols, I recommend reading my overview of those first.

nanomsg is a shared library written in C. This, combined with its zero-copy API, makes it an extremely low-latency transport layer. While there are a lot of client bindings which allow you to use nanomsg from other languages, dealing with shared libraries can often be a pain—not to mention it complicates deployment.

More and more companies are starting to use Go for backend development because of its speed and concurrency primitives. It’s really good at building server components that scale. Go obviously provides the APIs needed for socket networking, but building a scalable distributed system that’s reliable using these primitives can be somewhat onerous. Solutions like nanomsg’s Scalability Protocols and ZeroMQ attempt to make this much easier by providing useful communication patterns and by taking care of other messaging concerns like queueing.

Naturally, there are Go bindings for nanomsg and ZeroMQ, but like I said, dealing with shared libraries can be fraught with peril. In Go (and often other languages), we tend to avoid loading native libraries if we can. It’s much easier to reason about, debug, and deploy a single binary than multiple. Fortunately, there’s a really nice implementation of nanomsg’s Scalability Protocols in pure Go called Mangos by Garrett D’Amore of illumos fame.

Mangos offers an idiomatic Go implementation and interface which affords us the same messaging patterns that nanomsg provides while maintaining compatibility. Pub/Sub, Pair, Req/Rep, Pipeline, Bus, and Survey are all there. It also supports the same pluggable transport model, allowing additional transports to be added (and extended ((Mangos supports TLS with the TCP transport as an experimental extension.))) on top of the base TCP, IPC, and inproc ones. ((A nanomsg WebSocket transport is currently in the works.)) Mangos has been tested for interoperability with nanomsg using the nanocat command-line interface.

One of the advantages of using a language like C is that it’s not garbage collected. However, if you’re using Go with nanomsg, you’re already paying the cost of GC. Mangos makes use of object pools in order to reduce pressure on the garbage collector. We can’t turn Go’s GC off, but we can make an effort to minimize pauses. This is critical for high-throughput systems, and Mangos tends to perform quite comparably to nanomsg.

Mangos (and nanomsg) has a very familiar, socket-like API. To show what this looks like, the code below illustrates a simple example of how the Pub/Sub protocol is used to build a fan-out messaging system.

My message queue test framework, Flotilla, uses the Req/Rep protocol to allow clients to send requests to distributed daemon processes, which handle them and respond. While this is a very simple use case where you could just as easily get away with raw TCP sockets, there are more advanced cases where Scalability Protocols make sense. We also get the added advantage of transport abstraction, so we’re not strictly tied to TCP sockets.

I’ve been building a distributed messaging system using Mangos as a means of federated communication. Pub/Sub enables a fan-out, interest-based broadcast and Bus facilitates many-to-many messaging. Both of these are exceptionally useful for connecting disparate systems. Mangos also supports an experimental new protocol called Star. This pattern is like Bus, but when a message is received by an immediate peer, it’s propagated to all other members of the topology.

My favorite Scalability Protocol is Survey. As I discussed in my nanomsg overview, there are a lot of really interesting applications of this. Survey allows a process to query the state of multiple peers in one shot. It’s similar to Pub/Sub in that the surveyor publishes a single message which is received by all the respondents (although there’s no topic subscriptions). The respondents then send a message back, and the surveyor collects these responses. We can also enforce a deadline on the respondent replies, which makes Survey particularly useful for service discovery.

With my messaging system, I’ve used Survey to implement a heartbeat protocol. When a broker spins up, it begins broadcasting a heartbeat using a Survey socket. New brokers can connect to existing ones, and they reply to the heartbeat which allows brokers to “discover” each other. If a heartbeat isn’t received before the deadline, the peer is removed. Mangos also handles reconnects, so if a broker goes offline and comes back up, peers will automatically reconnect.

To summarize, if you’re building distributed systems in Go, consider taking a look at Mangos. You can certainly roll your own messaging layer with raw sockets, but you’re going to end up writing a lot of logic for a robust system. Mangos, and nanomsg in general, gives you the right abstraction to quickly build systems that scale and are fast.

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Benchmark Responsibly

When I posted my Dissecting Message Queues article last summer, it understandably caused some controversy.  I received both praise and scathing comments, emails asking why I didn’t benchmark X and pull requests to bump the numbers of Y. To be honest, that analysis was more of a brain dump from my own test driving of various message queues than any sort of authoritative or scientific study—it was far from the latter, to say the least. The qualitative discussion was pretty innocuous, but the benchmarks and supporting code were the target of a lot of (valid) criticism. In retrospect, it was probably irresponsible to publish them, but I was young and naive back then; now I’m just mostly naive.

Comparing Apples to Other Assorted Fruit

One such criticism was that the benchmarks were divided into two very broad categories: brokerless and brokered. While the brokerless group compared two very similar libraries, ZeroMQ and nanomsg, the second group included a number of distinct message brokers like RabbitMQ, Kafka, NATS, and Redis, to name a few.

The problem is not all brokers are created equal. They often have different goals and different prescribed use cases. As such, they impose different guarantees, different trade-offs, and different constraints. By grouping these benchmarks together, I implied they were fundamentally equivalent, when in fact, most were fundamentally different. For example, NATS serves a very different purpose than Kafka, and Redis, which offers pub/sub messaging, typically isn’t thought of as a message broker at all.

Measure Right or Don’t Measure at All

Another criticism was the way in which the benchmarks were performed. The tests were immaterial. The producer, consumer, and the message queue itself all ran on the same machine. Even worse, they used just a single publisher and subscriber. Not only does it not test what a remotely realistic configuration looks like, but it doesn’t even give you a good idea of a trivial one.

To be meaningful, we need to test with more than one producer and consumer, ideally distributed across many machines. We want to see how the system scales to larger workloads. Certainly, the producers and consumers cannot be collocated when we’re measuring discrete throughputs on either end, nor should the broker. This helps to reduce confounding variables between the system under test and the load generation.

It’s Not Rocket Science, It’s Computer Science

The third major criticism lay with the measurements themselves. Measuring throughput is fairly straightforward: we look at the number of messages sent per unit of time at both the sender and the receiver. If we think of a pipe carrying water, we might look at a discrete cross section and the rate at which water passes through it.

Latency, as a concept, is equally simple. With the pipe, it’s the time it takes for a drop of water to travel from one end to the other. While throughput is dependent on the pipe’s diameter, latency is dependent upon its length. What this means is that we can’t derive one from the other. In order to properly measure latency, we need to consider the latency of each message sent through the system.

However, we can’t ignore the relationship between throughput and latency and what the compromise between them means. Generally, we want to make things as fast as possible. Consider a single-cycle CPU. Its latency per instruction will be extremely low but contrasted with a pipelined processor, its throughput is abysmal—one instruction per clock cycle. The implication is that if we trade per-operation latency for throughput, we actually get a decrease in latency for aggregate instructions. Unfortunately, the benchmarks eschewed this relationship by requiring separate latency and throughput tests which used different code paths.

The interaction between latency and throughput is easy to get confused, but it often has interesting ramifications, whether you’re looking at message queues, CPUs, or databases. In a general sense, we’d say “optimize for latency” because lower latency means higher throughput, but the reality is it’s almost always easier (and more cost-effective) to increase throughput than it is to decrease latency, especially on commodity hardware.

Capturing this data, in and of itself, isn’t terribly difficult, but what’s more susceptible to error is how it’s represented. This was the main fault of the benchmarks (in addition to the things described earlier). The most egregious thing they did was report latency as an average. This is like the cardinal sin of benchmarking. The number is practically useless, particularly without any context like a standard deviation.

We know that latency isn’t going to be uniform, but it’s probably not going to follow a normal distribution either. While network latency may be prone to fitting a nice bell curve, system latency almost certainly won’t. They often exhibit things like GC pauses and other “hiccups,” and averages tend to hide these.

latency

Measuring performance isn’t all that easy, but if you do it, at least do it in a way that disambiguates the results. Look at quantiles, not averages. If you do present a mean, include the standard deviation and max in addition to the 90th or 99th percentile. Plotting latency by percentile distribution is an excellent way to see what your performance behavior actually looks like. Gil Tene has a great talk on measuring latency which I highly recommend.

Working Towards a Better Solution

With all this in mind, we can work towards building a better way to test and measure messaging systems. The discussion above really just gives us three key takeaways:

  1. Don’t compare apples to oranges.
  2. Don’t instrument tests in a way that’s not at all representative of real life.
  3. Don’t present results in a statistically insignificant way.

My first attempt at taking these ideas to heart is a tool I call Flotilla. It’s meant to provide a way to test messaging systems in more realistic configurations, at scale, while offering more useful data. Flotilla allows you to easily spin up producers and consumers on arbitrarily many machines, start a message broker, and run a benchmark against it, all in an automated fashion. It then collects data like producer/consumer throughput and the complete latency distribution and reports back to the user.

Flotilla uses a Go port of HdrHistogram to capture latency data, of which I’m a raving fan. HdrHistogram uses a bucketed approach to record values across a configured high-dynamic range at a particular resolution. Recording is in the single-nanosecond range and the memory footprint is constant. It also has support for correcting coordinated omission, which is a common problem in benchmarking. Seriously, if you’re doing anything performance sensitive, give HdrHistogram a look.

Still, Flotilla is not perfect and there’s certainly work to do, but I think it’s a substantial improvement over the previous MQ benchmarking utility. Longer term, it would be great to integrate it with something like Comcast to test workloads under different network conditions. Testing in a vacuum is nice and all, but we know in the real word, the network isn’t perfectly reliable.

So, Where Are the Benchmarks?

Omitted—for now, anyway. My goal really isn’t to rank a hodgepodge of different message queues because there’s really not much value in doing that. There are different use cases for different systems. I might, at some point, look at individual systems in greater detail, but comparing things like message throughput and latency just devolves into a hotly contested pissing contest. My hope is to garner more feedback and improvements to Flotilla before using it to definitively measure anything.

Benchmark responsibly.

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Not Invented Here

Engineers love engineering things. The reason is self-evident (and maybe self-fulfilling—why else would you be an engineer?). We like to think we’re pretty good at solving problems. Unfortunately, this mindset can, on occasion, yield undesirable consequences which might not be immediately apparent but all the while damaging.

Developers are all in tune with the idea of “don’t reinvent the wheel,” but it seems to be eschewed sometimes, deliberately or otherwise. People don’t generally write their own merge sort, so why would they write their own consensus protocol? Anecdotally speaking, they do.

Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is a very real thing. In many cases, consciously or not, it’s a cultural problem. In others, it’s an engineering one. Camille Fournier’s blog post on ZooKeeper helps to illustrate this point and provide some context. In it, she describes why some distributed systems choose to rely on external services, such as ZooKeeper, for distributed coordination, while others build in their own coordination logic.

We draw a parallel between distributed systems and traditional RDBMSs, which typically implement their own file system and other low-level facilities. Why? Because it’s their competitive advantage. SQL databases sell because they offer finely tuned performance, and in order to do that, they need to control these things that the OS otherwise provides. Distributed databases like Riak sell because they own the coordination logic, which helps promote their competitive advantage. This follows what Joel Spolsky says about NIH Syndrome in that “if it’s a core business function—do it yourself, no matter what.”

If you’re developing a computer game where the plot is your competitive advantage, it’s OK to use a third party 3D library. But if cool 3D effects are going to be your distinguishing feature, you had better roll your own.

This makes a lot of sense. My sorting algorithm is unlikely to provide me with a competitive edge, but something else might, even if it’s not particularly novel.

So in some situations, homegrown is justifiable, but that’s not always the case. Redis’ competitive advantage is its predictably low latencies and data structures. Does it make sense for it to implement its own clustering and leader election protocols? Maybe, but this is where NIH can bite you. If what you’re doing is important and there’s precedent, lean on existing research and solutions. Most would argue write safety is important, and there is certainly precedent for leader election. Why not leverage that work? Things like Raft, Paxos, and Zab provide solutions which are proven using formal methods and are peer reviewed. That doesn’t mean new solutions can’t be developed, but they generally require model checking and further scrutiny to ensure correctness. Otherwise, you’ll inevitably run into problems. Implementing our own solutions can provide valuable insight, but leave them at home if they’re not rigorously approached. Rolling your own and calling it “good enough” is dishonest to your users if it’s not properly communicated.

Elasticsearch is another interesting case to look at. You might say Elasticsearch’s competitive advantage is its full-text search engine, but it’s not. Like Solr, it’s built on Lucene. Elasticsearch was designed from the ground-up to be distributed. This is what gives it a leg up over Solr and other similar search servers where horizontal scaling and fault tolerance were essentially tacked on. In a way, this resembles what happened with Redis, where failover and clustering were introduced as an afterthought. However, unlike Redis, which chose to implement its own failover coordination and cluster-membership protocol, Solr opted to use ZooKeeper as an external coordinator.

We see that Elasticsearch’s core advantage is its distributed nature. Following that notion, it makes sense for it to own that coordination, which is why its designers chose to implement their own internal cluster membership, ZenDisco. But it turns out writing cluster-membership protocols is really fucking hard, and unless you’ve written proofs for it, you probably shouldn’t do it at all. The analogy here would be writing your own encryption algorithm—there’s tons of institutional knowledge which has laid the groundwork for solutions which are well-researched and well-understood. That knowledge should be embraced in situations like this.

I don’t mean to pick on Redis and Elasticsearch. They’re both excellent systems, but they serve as good examples for this discussion. The problem is that users of these systems tend to overlook the issues exposed by this mentality. Frankly, few people would know problems exist unless they are clearly documented by vendors (and not sales people) and even then, how many people actually read the docs cover-to-cover? It’s essential we know a system’s shortcomings and edge cases so we can recognize which situations to apply it and, more important, which we should not.

You don’t have to rely on an existing third-party library or service. Believe it or not, this isn’t a sales pitch for ZooKeeper. If it’s a core business function, it probably makes sense to build it yourself as Joel describes. What doesn’t make sense, however, is to build out whatever that is without being cognizant of conventional wisdom. I’m amazed at how often people are willing to throw away institutional knowledge, either because they don’t seek it out or they think they can do better (without formal verification). If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.