UPDATED 00:53 EDT / SEPTEMBER 11 2019

CLOUD

Netifi, Facebook and others team up to advance ‘reactive programming’ technologies

Cloud-native application platform company Netifi Inc. Tuesday said it’s teaming up with some big names, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Facebook Inc., Pivotal Software Inc. and Lightbend Inc. to form the Reactive Foundation, which aims to accelerate the development of new technologies for building microservices-based applications.

One of those technologies is Rsocket, an open source application protocol that helps enable something called “reactive programming.” The aim of reactive programming is to build applications that maintain a consistent user experience regardless of traffic on the network, infrastructure performance and different end user devices. It involves using a message-driven approach to achieve the resiliency, responsiveness and scalability that’s demanded by today’s modern, cloud-native applications.

The Reactive Foundation, which is governed by the Linux Foundation, says its goal is to establish a formal governance model and neutral ecosystem to support open source reactive programming projects.

The Foundation views reactive programming tools such as Rsocket as a superior replacement to older technologies such as Representational State Transfer. REST, as it’s known, is the most common system used by developers to ensure microservices, which are the components of modern applications, can communicate with one another.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE last year, Robert Roeser, Netifi’s cofounder and chief information officer, explained that REST is actually a much older technology than microservices, first developed in 2000 to provide interoperability between computer systems on the web. It is essentially a “hack” on top of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that emerged during the days of traditional monolithic three-tier applications, so it’s not really suitable for microservices, which are a more modern concept.

“Microservices require the ability to process data as it comes, and should be bidirectional, have application flow control, support binary data, be able to fragment requests for greater responsiveness and exchange metadata about a connection,” Roeser said. “Distributed systems are difficult enough on their own. The last thing that we need is to make them more complex by using something not designed for them.”

RSocket, first developed by Netflix Inc. before being made open source, is specifically designed to enable more consistent and efficient communications between microservices. It works by enabling application flow control over networks to prevent outages and increase application resiliency.

It also allows for the use of a single connection, through which messages are passed as streams of data. That enables long-lived streams across different transport connections, which is particularly useful for mobile to server communication where network connections drop, switch and reconnect frequently.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that although reactive applications perform better. developers face big challenges when it comes to building them, especially at the network layer. And while RSocket has been around for a few years already and is technically superior to HTTP, it hasn’t gotten much traction among developers so far.

“Changing architecture layers doesn’t happen fast,” Mueller said. “Let’s hope the creation of a foundation under the Linux Foundation will lead to further uptake and adoption. This is crucial for the success of reactive microservices-based next-generation applications.”

Netifi Chief Executive Arsalan Farooq wrote in a blog post on Medium Tuesday that his goal is for RSocket to eventually replace HTTP as the “lingua franca” for microservices and distributed systems.

“That would help fill the technology gap so that a traditional enterprise developer can build sophisticated, cloud-native, distributed applications with minimal effort,” he said.

Image: Reactive Foundation

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