Hello everyone, I'm technical team lead of Hermes project. I will try to answer already posted questions, but feel free to ask me anything.
1) Can you comment on how this compares to Confluent's REST proxy? We do not perceive Hermes as mere proxy. While Confluent product wants to help services written in non-jvm languages in connecting to Kafka, Hermes is more then that. First of all we wanted to make connecting to PubSub as easy as possible, hence REST API for publishing (this is same as REST proxy), but also converting from pull to push on consumer side. This means, that our consumers don't need to include Kafka drivers, handle retries or worry about linear commit offset. Instead, our hermes-consumer module implements retry strategies and adaptive output-rate algorithm. Consumer needs to register HTTP (or JMS) endpoint that can accept POST message and that is all. Secondly, on the publisher side, we wanted to create somewhat bullet-proof solution capable of accepting very sensitive data. This means we use Kafka producer buffer to store unsent messages (our internal solution also persists this buffer to disk, this will be ported to OpenSource soon) and we can guarantee maximum response time (SLA). We also are able to use different levels of Kafka ACKs per topic (-1 or 1 currently). Last but not least, we mitigate some of administrative issues: added tons of metrics that can be reported to graphite, message state tracking for debugging purposes, easy to use REST API for previewing messages stored at Kafka or to retransmit events starting from given timestamp (not offset!), 2) Performance We plan on making tests public, but they are not there yet. The numbers in docs come from our production environment, but they should be taken with grain of salt. Hermes performance depends highly on underlying Kafka cluster performance. Our cluster is deployed in cloud (on SSDs), bare metal deployments would probably achieve a lot better performance. Still, the most important metric here is not total response time, but Hermes overhead over pure Kafka. Looks like this is neglible in our cloud deployment (p99 < 0.2ms), but we will be crunching those numbers and publish them in docs. 3) Topics/subscriptions limit We are limited by Kafka as well, though we never encountered any problems with this (still, we have only 100-150 topics). We want to scale out by making Hermes multi-kafka aware (in effort to become multi DC). Currently management node can manage multiple Kafka clusters, but as soon as we deploy it on production we will add some more documentation on architecture and deployment. We should create FAQ that would answer some most popular questions. 2015-05-18 13:14 GMT+02:00 Marcin Kuthan <marcin.kut...@gmail.com>: > Hi Warren > > With Hermes, the publisher is never blocked. Even if message has not > been sent to Kafka cluster, or if message has been sent but not > acknowledged. It is especially useful if your system needs to have > strict SLA guarantees. > > From the consumers perspective there is retrying policy if the > consumer is not able to handle published message. In addition, Hermes > is able to adjust speed of sending messages to actual situation (i.e. > subscribing service has slown down due to heavy GC) > > > On 18 May 2015 at 09:56, Warren Henning <warren.henn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Interesting. Thanks for sharing and working on this! > > > > Can you comment on how this compares to Confluent's REST proxy? > > > > On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 12:01 AM, Marcin Kuthan <marcin.kut...@gmail.com > > > > wrote: > > > >> Hi Everyone > >> > >> Hermes is an asynchronous message broker built on top of Kafka. It > >> provides reliable, fault tolerant REST interface for message > >> publishing and adaptive push mechanisms for message sending. Hermes is > >> used as a message broker for asynchronous communication between > >> microservices. > >> > >> Some of the main features: > >> > >> - Performance and scalability - Hermes in production handling up to > >> 30.000 msgs/sec with 99.9th percentile latency below 100 ms on a > >> 4-node cluster. > >> > >> - Reliability - Hermes is used for publishing sensitive data, such as > >> billing events, user account changes etc. Hermes allows to define more > >> reliable policy for those important events - require acknowledge from > >> all Kafka replicas and increase request timeouts. > >> > >> - Push model - It makes receiving messages from Hermes dead simple: > >> you just have to write one HTTP endpoint in your service. It’s up to > >> Hermes to create Kafka consumer, redeliver messages, keep eye on > >> throughput limits etc. > >> > >> Feedback and comments are welcome, you can find Hermes documentation at: > >> http://hermes-pubsub.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html > >> > >> Hermes is published under Apache Licence: > >> https://github.com/allegro/hermes > >> > >> Best Regards, > >> Marcin > >> >
