liblink

Elixir messaging library aimed at heteregenous clusters/services with automatic service discovery and encryption.

THE PROBLEM

There are two or more services that need to communicate securely in a request-response fashion with each other. you like erlang/otp but find that it is not suitable for this particular task. A few reasons that erlang/otp might not be the best solution:

• placement constraints:

  • erlang distribution assumes a homogenous network;

  • no node discovery/announcement;

  • no load-balacing mechanism;

• security:

  • no authentication mechanism;

  • enabling tls on an erlang distribution might not be a trivial task;

  • you can't limit what kind of tasks a node can perform on the cluster;

• performance:

  • it creates a full mesh connection between all participant nodes, i.e., in a cluster of $n$ nodes you have $n^2$ connections;

interoperability:

• you might need to expose a service in a different language;

These aspects are by no means a comprehensive list of requirements you should consider before making a choice. They may not even make sense for your application.

Depending on your constraints and current resources, there are alternatives you might also consider:

• an API built on top of HTTP [e.g.: a RESTful api];

• http://www.release-project.eu/

• https://hexdocs.pm/libcluster/readme.html

• consul connect

OBJECTIVES

• support multiple message protocols: request-response, publish-subscribe, pipeline;

• support different languages;

• automatic service discovery/announcement;

• possibility to create complex topologies using service metadata;

• built-in, zero-configuration, encryption mechanism;

• built-in authentication mechanism;

• built-in distributed tracing;

CURRENT IMPLEMENTATION

• protocol support:

  • request-response;
  • publish-subscribe;
  • pipeline;

• service discovery:

  • consul backend;

• multi language support;

• encryption;

• authentication;

• distributed tracing;

DOCUMENTATION

• https://hex.pm/packages/liblink

LICENSE

APACHE-2.0

CONTRIBUTORS

• AUTHORS.md