category
Messaging
- #51 11 min
Benchmarking Message Queue Latency
About a year and a half ago, I published Dissecting Message Queues, which broke down a few different messaging systems and did some performance benchmarking. It was a naive attempt and had a lot of problems, but it was also my first time doing any kind of system benchmarking. It turns out benchmarking systems correctly is actually pretty difficult and many folks get it wrong. I don’t claim to have gotten it right, but over the past year and a half I’ve learned a lot, tried to build some better tools, and improve my methodology.
- #50 21 min
From the Ground Up: Reasoning About Distributed Systems in the Real World
The rabbit hole is deep. Down and down it goes. Where it ends, nobody knows. But as we traverse it, patterns appear. They give us hope, they quell the fear. Distributed systems literature is abundant, but as a practitioner, I often find it difficult to know where to start or how to synthesize this knowledge without a more formal background. This is a non-academic’s attempt to provide a line of thought for rationalizing design decisions. This piece doesn’t necessarily contribute any new ideas but rather tries to provide a holistic framework by studying some influential existing ones. It includes references which provide a good starting point for thinking about distributed systems. Specifically, we look at a few formal results and slightly less formal design principles to provide a basis from which we can argue about system design.
- #49 20 min
Breaking and Entering: Lose the Lock While Embracing Concurrency
This article originally appeared on Workiva’s engineering blog as a two-part series. Providing robust message routing was a priority for us at Workiva when building our distributed messaging infrastructure. This encompassed directed messaging, which allows us to route messages to specific endpoints based on service or client identifiers, but also topic fan-out with support for wildcards and pattern matching. Existing message-oriented middleware, such as RabbitMQ, provide varying levels of support for these but don’t offer the rich features needed to power Wdesk. This includes transport fallback with graceful degradation, tunable qualities of service, support for client-side messaging, and pluggable authentication middleware. As such, we set out to build a new system, not by reinventing the wheel, but by repurposing it.
- #44 7 min
What You Want Is What You Don’t: Understanding Trade-Offs in Distributed Messaging
If there’s one unifying theme of this blog, it’s that distributed systems are riddled with trade-offs. Specifically, with distributed messaging, you cannot have exactly-once delivery. However, messaging trade-offs don’t stop at delivery semantics. I want to talk about what I mean by this and explain why many developers often have the wrong mindset when it comes to building distributed applications. The natural tendency is to build distributed systems as if they aren’t distributed at all—assuming data consistency, reliable messaging, and predictability. It’s much easier to reason about, but it’s also blatantly misleading.
- #31 5 min
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.