asp2insp / gossip

Simple Go messaging multiqueue

GoSSIP - Simple Go messaging and data synchronization framework

Motivation

GoSSIP wants to be the synchronization layer for your distributed data application. Let's say you're building the next $19B chat app and you need a way to orchestrate multiple writes to a piece of shared state, like a message queue. Traditionally this is done by having a single central server which accepts updates from a client and then re-distributes that update to all other clients. The server also takes care of ordering messages as they come in. These tasks make up the two important parts of synchronization: Causality, and Replication. In today's world of massive connectivity, a distributed approach to data synchronization can save CPU power and bandwidth (and thus money).

Replication

This one is is straightforward. We have a bunch of nodes and we want each node to receive (or have the option to receive) every message that flows through the system.

Causality

It's important to know the ordering of messages in a distributed system (after all, you wouldn't want your users' messages appearing out of order right?). A full ordering is impossible without external synchronization (back to a central server), but we can achieve a partial ordering, enough to say that "Event 1 came before Event 2" in many cases by sending some carefully crafted metadata along with each message.

Message

Node

Network

FAQ

Is it performant?

Immutability, when done right, brings lots of performance benefits. For example, the entire API can be zero copy and equality by reference since actual messages are not passed along pipes, only references to them.

That's a lot of keyword spam, what does this do for me?

Takes care of data replication, ordering, and synchronization between lots of nodes (servers, clients, et). Provides a friendly API which makes it easy to build a realtime data application.

What's in a name?

GoSSIP stands for Go Simple Stable Interconnection Package (revisions welcome)