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Re: RSocket Followup (post TOC meeting)

Timothy Bozarth <tim@...>
 

I see Kailash CCd me into the thread given Netflix's experience with both RSocket and gRPC.  

It should be noted that at this point (as of roughly 6 months ago) all use of RSocket has been completely abandoned at Netflix in favor of gRPC, and the only team that build an app with RSocket chose to rewrite their app leveraging gRPC and the associated components.  gRPC has also allowed us to build (and easily integrate) a suite of resilience-oriented tech, such as our Adaptive Concurrency Limiters (https://medium.com/@NetflixTechBlog/performance-under-load-3e6fa9a60581) that solve the retry-storm problem with no additional client-side complexity or configuration.

While I am not best-suited to address statements on the matrix of specific points being discussed, if anyone has questions, I can speak to the many usability/ergonomic, simplicity, community, and development-velocity/productivity related reasons that ultimately led Netflix (both the Platform team, and the users) to choose gRPC as our microservice RPC foundation.

Tim Bozarth
Director, Platform @ Netflix


On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 10:52 AM, Kailash Sethuraman <hsaliak@...> wrote:
Adding Tim Bozarth from Netflix, who's had some practical experience working with both gRPC and RSocket. Full thread here: https://lists.cncf.io/g/cncf-toc/topic/rsocket_followup_post_toc/24221841

+1 to a public feature comparison table. 
In such a table, it will be good to figure out how to do justice to deliberate design choices and the tradeoffs. For example, broker vs no-broker, or choosing to base on top of http/2. Projects have valid reasons to go one way or another, and those considerations are very beneficial for the user to understand.


FYI : I saw a few minor misconceptions for gRPC and I have called out a few that stood out.:
- binary - must be wrapped in protobuf. This is not necessary, though offers a convenience. There are other formats  (eg: flatbuffers) that support gRPC service generation.
- max payload size is confiugrable
- full duplex -- not sure what this means. gRPC supports bi directional streams.
- IPC  is not protobuf only. 



On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 3:45 PM <colin@...> wrote:
Reading through the responses, imo this speaks to a need for a public project feature comparison I mentioned elsewhere in this thread (https://lists.cncf.io/g/cncf-toc/message/2192).


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