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Why use HTTP for transport instead of Messagepack or ZMQ? Seems a bit overkill if you are whipping binary data back and forth between services. Protobuf + ZMQ s

by lykr0n 9y ago

Why use HTTP for transport instead of Messagepack or ZMQ? Seems a bit overkill if you are whipping binary data back and forth between services. Protobuf + ZMQ seems a lot more efficient to me.

mentat 9y ago
A lot of this boils down to wanting to be able to use standard load balancers.
- grogenaut 9y ago
  Not just standard load balancers, standard http stacks. Polyglotness is a big benefit here.
- lykr0n 9y ago
  ZMQ uses ZMTP which is a TCP protocol, and for example, HAProxy supports TCP just as much as TCP/HTTP.
grogenaut 9y ago
Absolute throughput or efficiency isn't the goal of most RPC mechanisms, twirp specifically. However I don't think it's underperformant either. It's very easy to reason about, and debug, plays with ELBs well, and most important, gets developers thinking at a Service to Service RPC level instead of about low level stuff. Fix and optimize throughput for services which actually have those problems.
jeremyjh 9y ago
Messagepack is a serialization format, not a transport. It is an alternative to protobuf or json. Mostly people use HTTP because there are so many services and components that already support it (load balancers, proxies, sidecars etc), it has well-supported options for authentication, conveys metadata seamlessly through multiple layers, and its overhead isn't an issue for the kind of payloads they are sending. Plus, you know, curl.