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Persistent transport
Persistent connections allow a single TCP connection to send and receive multiple requests/responses instead of opening a new TCP connection for each pair. When an application opens fewer TCP connections and keeps them open for a longer period, it causes less network traffic, use less time establishing new connections, and allows the TCP protocol to work more efficiently.
Currently Zaqar has support for a non-persistent transport, leaving aside some use cases that would be covered in a more efficient and reliable way with a persistent transport solution.
Some use cases that will be positively impacted by this change are:
- Communication with browsers: Websocket will enhance the communication between browsers and Zaqar, a key factor in the integration of Zaqar with the OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon).
- Notifications: this type of transport will constitute a better protocol for notifications, a feature planned for Kilo as well.
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/zaqar/+spec/persistent-transport
Problem description
Currently there is no way to establish persistent connections in Zaqar. This spec proposes adding this feature through a websocket implementation.
During Kilo release we refactored the code to make the addition of this driver feasible, and we worked on adding the queues endpoint.
To provide full support for the data plane, we should add the messages endpoint and the claims endpoint.
The control plane operations do not require the performance that a websocket driver can provide, hence we are not going to add websocket support for the control plane.
Proposed change
The proposed change, as stated in previous sections, is to add a persistent transport alternative to Zaqar. This can be done by using websocket.
Websocket provide a full-duplex communication channel operating over a single socket that will remove overhead and significantly reduce complexity.
Fallback
In case WebSocket is not available, the client will fallback to short-polling the REST API.
Some of the reasons of WebSockets not being available are:
- Firewalls could be configured to kill HTTP connections after a certain amount of time.
- Concerns from a security standpoint will lead to killing any traffic over port 80 or 443 that doesn't look like HTTP.
Messages serialization
A serialization technology is needed in order to transport data. There are several alternatives, including JSON, MsgPack, Protobuf, Apache Avro and Cap'n Proto.
In the previous cycle we noted that the whereas MsgPack was the best candidate -considering overall performance, easiness to use, languages support, data structures support-, it doesn't have good support for Javascript. Using MsgPack would impose a significative constraint to the Zaqar use cases, considering that many web applications nowaways are written with Javascript. For that reason, we decided to stick with JSON and maybe talk about a more performant serialization technology in a future change.
Alternatives
- Establish persistent connections enabling WSGI keep-alive
- Long polling
Implementation
Assignee(s)
Primary assignee: vkmc
Milestones
Target Milestone for completion: Liberty-1
Work Items
- Implement messages controller
- Implement claims controller
- Write messages unit tests
- Write claims unit tests
- Would like to have: write functional tests
- Perform benchmarks with the new driver
WebSocket Libraries
After discussing several alternatives, including SockJS, SocketIO, Autobahn, ws4py and Tornado, it has been decided that Autobahn is going to be used to implement this feature. More details on this decision will be available in the WebSockets wiki.
Dependencies
Note
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