GraphQL for inter-service communication

From the benchmarks I have done with protobuf, flat buffer, avro, msgpack, thrift, cbor and etf, for encoding/decoding, Etf is really fast , I think this is due to the free serialization of erlang term in the BEAM. But for the size of the binary data, protobuf seems to be the best.

That’s not always the case, term_to_binary and vice-versa are not made for speed, consequently there are a number of encoders for the BEAM that are actually quite a bit faster than it (although it’s all so fast anyway that it doesn’t really matter in most cases)

Thanks for the video. Really interesting.
Asynchronous mechanisms in distributed system or microservices it’s a good way.
But I’m trying again to understand the concept and how it could be managed over a network.
If you have some examples or code using this concept I would be interested.

And I’m struggled why some many big companies Google, Facebook, etc.. are using a lot of RPC’s style internally while message passing seems better .

Because at the end recent RPC solution such as gRPC, Thrift, Avro, etc.. are kind of RPC over messaging. Code does not call remote method as local method but kind of wrapper around a use case. But publishing as method over an IDL RPC interface.

Use message passing, like Erlang does instead of RPC systems that try to simulate that calling external function is the same as local call. Just watch this:

Looking at Ernie.
Do you have an idea why the repository mentions that?

Authors of this document believes that RPC are bad, and you should not use them. Instead use message passing between your services.

And what message passing between your services means otherwise ?

Cookies aren’t security feature, you can use distribution over SSL and you do not need to use EPMD if you do not want. Additionally you can always use solutions like Linkerd, Envoy, or Consul Connect for creating secure service mesh.

Is it better to use distribution, or to send a erlang term over ssl using term_to_binary?

I’d still recommend FlatBuffers, check it out. There’s a really good Elixir library, too.

The transport could be anything. I’d choose QUIC but there are still no Erlang/Elixir libraries. HTTP/2 or gRPC should be more than adequate for a while.

If you are looking for something P2P-like, I recommend checking out Phoenix.Presence.

Yes I do want to be dependant of the transport, because this layer may evolve for example: TCP,UDP, QUIC,SCPT, WebRTC,etc.. And the data and format exchanged should remains the same to ensure compatiblity.

Indeed I’m not using the BERT or Ernie specification but using ETF with :erlang.term_to_binary to encode freely any term in a binary format without involving any dependencies which come almost for free.
Even if protobuf or Cap’nProto produces a smaller encoded data, Erlang Term Format is definitevely the fastest data encoding on Erlang/Elixir and do not require to generate code.

Does the C nodes helps to avoid the erlang distribution via cookie and capable to be in an unsafe network support ?