Service Mesh

Thrift on Steroids: A Tale of Scale and Abstraction

Apache Thrift is an RPC framework developed at Facebook for building “scalable cross-language services.” It consists of an interface definition language (IDL), communication protocol, API libraries, and a code generator that allows you to build and evolve services independently and in a polyglot fashion across a wide range of languages. This is nothing new and has been around for over a decade now. There are a number of notable users of Thrift aside from Facebook, including Twitter (mainly by way of Finagle), Foursquare, Pinterest, Uber (via TChannel), and Evernote, among others—and for good reason, Thrift is mature and battle-tested.