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by cmelbye 5532 days ago
This is only slightly on-topic, but regarding the service-oriented architecture that he mentions at the beginning of the article, how would one implement this internal? Specifically, how would you communicate with your internal services? Just an HTTP API? Is that fast enough? Another thing I'm wondering is what's the best way to handle internal authentication between your frontend and some backend service for example? Sorry if this is too specific for this discussion, but I've just always wondered this and I figure that HN knows.
2 comments
shykes 5531 days ago
DotCloud [1] is built from the ground up around distributed services. We use a custom rpc mechanism called ZeroRPC. It uses ZeroMQ [2] for transport, msgpack [3] for serialization, and some extra glue for RPC mechanics, discovery, event dispatching, etc.

Among other neat tricks, it allows us to handle synchronous RPC calls and asynchronous message passing in a unified way. It also maps transparently to any ZeroMQ topology.

Combine this with the recent release of gevent support for zeromq [4] and you get a fun, fun playground :)

[1] http://www.dotcloud.com

[2] http://www.zeromq.org

[3] http://msgpack.org

[4] https://github.com/zllak/gevent-zeromq

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cmelbye 5531 days ago
Oh, awesome, thank you!. I never thought to use ZeroMQ, but that would work perfectly. Ironically, it doesn't seem like DotCloud supports these sorts of architectures very well yet, any plans to fix that? ;)
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shykes 5531 days ago
Absolutely - our job is to make developers happy and productive. Whenever we find a sweet tool that makes our lives easier, we're practically tripping over ourselves to share it with you

Our network team is working on some major goodies which should make you happy. Personally they bring tears to my eyes :)

In the meantime, my recommendation is to start with http. If you keep the RPC semantics simple, you can easily migrate to a different transport later. And you'll need HTTP to authenticate and encrypt at the boundaries anyway.

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adpowers 5532 days ago
I don't think it covers authentication, but take a look at Thrift:

http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/

It provides an RPC framework and IDL.

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iam 5531 days ago
If only thrift had some sort of signal/event support :(.
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