Tervela Message Medium Blog | brackish water

Many years ago, I was on a boat on the Cooper River in Charleston, South Carolina with an extremely interesting ecosystem researcher.  He was studying the behavior of aquatic life in the brackish water of Charleston Harbor.  Brackish water is a mix of fresh water and salt water, often found when fresh water rivers meet the salt water ocean.  In my case, it was the Cooper River meeting Charleston Harbor.  Brackish water ecosystems, though apparently resilient (salinity changes frequently), are actually rather fragile.

We have similar challenges in our middleware ecosystems.   We’ve built many systems around queuing models and frameworks, but we’re challenged by massive (and growing) data volumes and demanding low latency requirements.  We’ve built peer-to-peer messaging systems that perform well with a few connections, but deteriorate when scaled. The two don’t necessarily blend.  It appears as if we’ve been unable to sustain a brackish ecosystem of messaging: you either have salt water or fresh water – you either have queuing or peer-to-peer.  Kirk Wylie alluded to this in a recent post on AMQP.
 

We need to embrace both frameworks. We need to support a brackish messaging ecosystem, one that can give us the scale and robustness of queuing systems, but with the hyper performance of peer-to-peer systems.  That was and still remains an architectural goal at Tervela.  It’s simply not a matter of throwing hardware at the problem; it’s about looking at things differently – looking at things “brackishly.”

=rob.ciampa

Tags: message queueing (1) peer-to-peer messaging (1) low latency messaging (1) brackish water (1) charleston harbor (1) 

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