Seastar VS redpanda

I used glommio as the async executor (instead of something like tokio), and it is wonderful. For people wondering whether it's "good enough" or to use C++ and seastar (as I have thought about a lot before starting this project), take the leap of faith, it's fast - both in terms of run time and to code.

b) It's proven now e.g Seastar, Glommio that the fastest way to run a multi-threaded application is to have one instance with one thread pinned per CPU core. Then to have fibers/lightweight threads on top handling all of the asynchronous code. Your approach of lots of instances is the slowest so there will be a ton of unnecessary thread context-switching.

The most common example is DPDK [1]. It's a framework for building bespoke networking stacks that are usable from userspace, without involving the kernel.

You'll find DPDK mentioned a lot in the networking/HPC/data center literature. An example of a backend framework that uses DPDK is the seastar framework [2]. Also, I recently stumbled upon a paper for efficient RPC networks in data centers [3].

If you want to learn more, the p99 conference by ScyllaDB has tons of speakers talking about some interesting challenges.

[1] https://www.dpdk.org/.

[2] https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

[3] https://github.com/erpc-io/eRPC

I assume Tokio itself, see e.g monoio or glommio, but also Seastar for C++.

https://core.dpdk.org/supported/ lists supported nics. You're best just reading material from the dpdk website for figuring out roughly what it is. It is used for a lot of different goals. For most web C++ stuff it's mainly used because you can avoid round trips of data passing through the kernel and can reference network data without tons of copying. For an example check out the SeaStar framework, https://seastar.io/, which is under the hood of ScyllaDB.

As this is a Kafka sub, this may be a good opportunity to mention that Redpanda is based on the same framework (seastar) as Scylla. The idea of sharding work to CPU cores turns out to apply very well to the Kafka data model, too!

Seastar which is a thread per core runtime written by the Scylla devs thats used in both Redpanda and Scylla as the underlying runtime. https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

ScyllaDB is, ironically, maybe one of the worst examples the author could have come up with for "abstraction" in the article.

If folks aren't familiar with their work/internal tech, go check out some of their repos like Seastar. They have some of the most talented systems programmers on the planet writing thin veneers over kernel and hardware API's to squeeze every ounce out of performance.

https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

I know it's beside the point, but I just had to share because I thought that was funny

I’ve seen frameworks for c++ (https://seastar.io/) and rust (https://github.com/actix/actix) which support what you’re describing out of the box.

If you're interested in scaling and asynchronous programming in c++ I highly recommend you investigate the SeaStar application framework. You wouldn't build a web service with SeaStar, rather you would build the infrastructure that you would use to build the web service on top of. https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

Stream-processing platforms such as Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda are specifically engineered to foster event-driven communication in a distributed system and they can be a great choice for developing loosely coupled applications. Stream processing platforms analyze data in motion, offering near-zero latency advantages. For example, consider an alert system for monitoring factory equipment. If a machine's temperature exceeds a certain threshold, a streaming platform can instantly trigger an alert and engineers do timely maintenance.

Yeah it’s just the stack switching itself that is a handful of cycles, but there is not much more overhead for the full VM switch if you structure your embedding the right way. Code the code is source available if you want to peek at it!

https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/blob/dev/src/v/was...

that's a littlebit of a stretch. when you say "no shortage" - outside of redpanda what product exists that actually compete in all deployment modes?

it's a misconception that redpanda is simply a better kafka. the way to think about it is that is a new storage engine, from scratch, that speaks the kafka protocol. similar to all of the pgsql companies in a different space, i.e.: big table pgsql support is not a better postgres, fundamentally different tech. you can read the src and design here: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda. or an electric car is not the same as a combustion engine, but only similar in that they are cars that take you from point a to point b.

Redpanda with the MongoDB Debezium Connector installed. We use Redpanda as a Kafka broker.

And Kafka + Kafka Connect has https://www.confluent.io/ https://aiven.io/ https://upstash.com/ (and not quite Kafka, but protocol-compatible, https://redpanda.com/)

There exists a C++ project which was created after Rust the language was available. github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/

I suggest you check out io_uring and thread per core architecture. Applications like scylladb and redpanda have thread per core architecture and use io_uring for async io.

Redpanda