Is It Time to Replace TCP in Data Centers?

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  • grpc_homa

    Allows Homa to be used as a transport with gRPC.

  • This seems like a review of John Ousterhout's work w/ Homa. I highly recommend reading the original. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.00714

    For those who don't know Ousterhout created the first log structured filesystem and created TCL (used heavily in hardware verification but also forming the backbone of the some of the first large web servers: aolserver). I was actually surprised to find out he co-founded a company with the current CTO of Cloudflare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ousterhout

    He has both a candidate replacement as well as benchmarks showing 40% performance improvements with grpc on homa compared to grpc on TCP. https://github.com/PlatformLab/grpc_homa

    With that in mind I think nobody will replace TCP and I doubt anything not IP compatible will be able to get off the ground. His argument is essentially that for low latency RPC protocols TCP is a bad choice.

    We've already seen people build a number of similar systems on UDP including HTTP replacements that have delivered value for clients doing lots of parallel requests on the WAN.

    I think many big tech companies are essentially already choosing to bypass TCP. I recall facebook doing alot of work with memcache on udp. I can't find any public docs on whether or not Google's internal RPC uses TCP.

    I wouldn't be surprised at all if in the near future something like grpc/capnproto/twirp/etc had an in-datacenter TCP-free fast path. It would be cool if it was built on Homa.

  • gRPC

    The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)

  • Well that's accidentally hella unfortunate.

    I've been assuming eventually gRPC over HTTP3[1] would get some traction from big camps. But if Google is using their own internal transport, it seems highly unlikely that these main authors of gRPC are ever going to care.

    [1] https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/19126

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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