caio.co/de/foca


There's a way to change runtime config nowadays 💬 by Caio 7 months ago (log)
... and I don't really think doing that automatically is a good thing
anymore: most clusters are fixed size(ish), what changes is the
visibility and liveness of their peers- I don't want parameters
changing during a rolling restart nor during actual outages.

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Foca: Cluster membership discovery on your terms

Foca is a building block for your gossip-based cluster discovery. It's a small no_std + alloc crate that implements the SWIM protocol along with its useful extensions (SWIM+Inf.+Susp.).

Project:

Introduction

The most notable thing about Foca is the fact that it does almost nothing. Out of the box, all it gives is a reliable and efficient implementation of the SWIM protocol that's transport and identity agnostic.

Knowledge of how SWIM works is helpful but not necessary to make use of this library. Reading the documentation for the Message enum should give you an idea of how the protocol works, but the paper is a very accessible read.

Foca is designed to fit into any sort of transport: If your network allows peers to talk to each other you can deploy Foca on it. Not only the general bandwidth requirements are low, but you also have full control of how members identify each other (see ./examples/identity_golf.rs) and how messages are encoded.

Usage

Please take a look at ./examples/foca_insecure_udp_agent.rs. It showcases how a simple tokio-based agent could look like and lets you actually run and see Foca swimming.

$ cargo run --features std,tracing,bincode-codec --example foca_insecure_udp_agent -- --help
foca_insecure_udp_agent 

USAGE:
    foca_insecure_udp_agent [OPTIONS] <BIND_ADDR>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -a, --announce <announce>    Address to another Foca instance to join with
    -f, --filename <filename>    Name of the file that will contain all active members
    -i, --identity <identity>    The address cluster members will use to talk to you.
                                 Defaults to BIND_ADDR

ARGS:
    <BIND_ADDR>    Socket address to bind to. Example: 127.0.0.1:8080

So you can start the agent in one terminal with ./foca_insecure_udp_agent 127.0.0.1:8000 and join it with as many others as you want with using a different BIND_ADDR and --announce to a running instance. Example: ./foca_insecure_udp_agent 127.0.0.1:8001 -a 127.0.0.1:8000.

The agent outputs some information to the console via tracing's subscriber. It defaults to the INFO log level and can be customized via the RUST_LOG environment variable using tracing_subscriber's EnvFilter directives.

Cargo Features

Every feature is optional. The default set will always be empty.

Notes

When writing this library, the main goal was having a simple and small core that's easy to test, simulate and reason about; It was mostly about getting a better understanding of the protocol after reading the paper.

Sticking to these goals naturally led to an implementation that doesn't rely on many operating system features like a hardware clock, atomics and threads, so becoming a no_std crate (albeit still requiring heap allocations) was kind of a nice accidental feature that I decided to commit to.

Comparison to memberlist

I avoided looking at memberlist until I was satisfied with my own implementation. Since then I did take a non-thorough look at it:

References

License

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all work is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0.

Files inside the examples/ directory are dedicated to the Public Domain.