Hi James, I am doing something almost identical to Bill with regards to discovery.
My system is a distributed cache, where I have X discovery proxies at fixed location with a fixed port for upstream/downstream. They are just xpub/xsub (with verbose/r on) zmq_proxy. + Cacher publishes (on a topic describing what's in its cache) it's location in a json message (ports, ip, other details) to the upstream port of the discovery proxy. + Consumers subscribe to downstream port of discovery proxy with a prefix partial subject of the caches they are interested in + Consumers parse the incoming json's, decide best cache and connect to it directly (bypassing the proxy). This system works between the DC and cloud (AWS). I also have a system using zeromq internally to the DC that uses mcast PGM to broadcast the discovery info. This is nice as there is no single point of failure but you have more discovery traffic (as mcast PUB/SUB have to filter on the SUB side) and you need a mcast capable network. James Harvey From: zeromq-dev <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Bill Torpey Sent: 23 June 2018 21:29 To: ZeroMQ development list <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [zeromq-dev] zmq architecture/protocol planning Hi James: I’m doing something similar on the service discovery end, but it’s a work in progress, so take this with the appropriate amount of salt ;-) It seems a good idea to minimize state as much as possible, especially distributed state, so I have so far avoided the central “registrar”, preferring to distribute that functionality out to the nodes, and to delegate as much functionality as possible to ZeroMQ itself. I’ve got a single well-known endpoint, which is a process running zmq_proxy (actually multiple processes, but let’s keep it simple). Nodes use PUB/SUB messaging to exchange discovery messages with the proxy, and use the discovery messages to establish direct PUB/SUB connections to peer nodes over a second socket pair. I let ZeroMQ deal with the filtering by topic. I also let ZeroMQ deal with ignoring multiple connection attempts to the same endpoint, which greatly simplifies the discovery protocol. (If you decide to do something like that, you probably want to make sure you are working with a relatively recent version of ZeroMQ — there have been some recent changes in that functionality: https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/pull/2879). The result of this is a fully-connected network, with each node having direct PUB/SUB connections to every other node. That may or may not work for your application, but for mine it is fine (~100 nodes total). As mentioned, there’s a somewhat complicated protocol that ensures that every node gets to see all the discovery messages, but without flooding the network. That part is still a work-in-progress, but it’s looking pretty reliable so far. If you decide to do something similar, let me suggest you take a look at the excellent ZMQ_XPUB_WELCOME_MSG socket option contributed by Doron Somech (https://somdoron.com/2015/09/reliable-pubsub/). I use this to get a notification when the discovery SUB socket is connected to the zmq_proxy, which triggers publication of discovery messages on the discovery PUB socket. Hope this helps... Regards, Bill On Jun 23, 2018, at 12:13 AM, James Addison <mailto:[email protected]> wrote: Looking for a little guidance/advice on ZMQ implementation. The following demonstrates the simplistic architecture that I'm considering. It doesn't take into consideration redundancy, load balancing at all levels (yet). The general flow of request/response traffic would be: -> HTTP request from internet -> nginx (1 node) -> aiohttp + zmq-based frontend (1 or more nodes depending on system demands) -> zmq-based router (1 node) -> zmq-based worker (n nodes; scalable depending on dynamic demand) I want my system to work in environments where multicast/broadcast is not available (ie. AWS EC2 VPC) - so I believe a well-known node for service discovery is needed. With that in mind, all zmq-based nodes would: - register with the 'central' service discovery (SD) node on startup to make other nodes aware of its presence - separately SUBscribe to the service discovery node's PUB endpoint to receive topics of pertinent peer nodes' connection details In the nginx config, I plan to have an 'upstream' defined in a separate file that is updated by a zmq-based process that also SUBscribes to the service discovery node. ZMQ-based processes, and their relation to other ZMQ-based processes: - service discovery (SD) - zmq-based nginx upstream backend updater; registers with SD, SUBs to frontend node topic (to automatically add frontend node connection details to nginx config and reload nginx) - frontend does some request validation and caching; registers with SD, SUBS to router node topic (to auto connect to the router's endpoint) - router is the standard zmq DEALER/ROUTER pattern; registers with SD - worker is the bit that handles the heavy lifting; registers with SD, SUBS to router node topic (to auto connect to the router's endpoint) The whole point of this is that each node only ever needs to know the well-known service discovery node endpoint - and each node can auto-discover and hopefully recover in most downtime scenarios (excluding mainly if the SD node goes down, but that's outside of scope at the moment). Questions! 1. Does this architecture make sense? In particular, the single well-known service discovery node and every other node doin PUB/SUB with it for relevant endpoint topics? 2. Who should heartbeat to who? PING/PONG? ie. when a given node registers with the SD node, should the registering node start heartbeating on the same connection to the SD node, or should the SD node open a separate new socket to the registering node? The SD node is the one that will need to know if registered nodes drop off the earth, I think? I'll likely have followup questions - hope that's ok! Thanks, James _______________________________________________ zeromq-dev mailing list mailto:[email protected] https://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev _______________________________________________ zeromq-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev
