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.