Hyperbahn enables service discovery and routing for large-scale systems comprised of many microservices. Distributed, fault tolerant, and highly available, it lets one service find and communicate with others simply and reliably without having to know where those services run.

Hyperbahn is an overlay network of routers designed to support the TChannel RPC protocol. Hyperbahn itself is based on Ringpop. Its router nodes dynamically converge and gossip known services onto a consistent hash ring topology, forming a mesh of services that can send requests to each other without human intervention or knowledge of specific ports and addresses.

Hyperbahn and TChannel clients are currently supported in Go, Python, and Node.js.

Hyperbahn Features

Whether you're making your service available to others or you're a service consumer, Hyperbahn comes with many features to make application development easier:

Configuration Discovery - Free yourself from managing host/port files or configurations.
Timeouts - Transitively enforce services' SLAs. Every request must specify a timeout, moving towards a fast failure model.
Retries - Eliminate transient failures within a request timeout window.
Load Balancing - Spread calls evenly across a service, and distribute outgoing requests evenly over connected Hyperbahn nodes.
Rate Limiting - Shield services from excessive calls.
Circuit Breaking - Prevent cascading failure and cut off broken clients. Build fast failure into all layers of the network.
Distributed Tracing - Understand the entire call flow using Zipkin.

Advertise on a Hyperbahn Cluster

Instantiate Hyperbahn client
Listen on an arbitrary (could be random) port
Connect to and advertise on Hyperbahn

Or use a service over Hyperbahn in only two steps:

Instantiate Hyperbahn client (if the client is also a service, you reuse the one you've already setup and registered over)
Send a request to the desired service and endpoint name

Local Quick Start

Hyperbahn is designed for large-scale microservice operations. However, you might want to develop and test (or just try it out) locally. To get started with Hyperbahn, set up a Hyperbahn cluster on your local machine.

git clone git@github.com:uber/hyperbahn
cd hyperbahn
./hyperbahn-dev.sh

You'll now have a two-node Hyperbahn cluster running. In one of the tmux windows, you should see the health checks of both nodes. Double check that the Hyperbahn cluster is healthy. If not, troubleshoot or report your issue.

To exit, run tmux kill-session -t hyperbahn in a seperate shell.

Getting Your App on Hyperbahn

The open source quick start template for Node.js (below) will start a "Hello, world!" TChannel app in Node.js that registers with Hyperbahn.

npm install tchannel-gen --global
cd ~/projects
tchannel-gen my-hyperbahn-app "A new hyperbahn app"
cd my-hyperbahn-app
npm install
make start
tcurl -p localhost:9000 my-service MyService::health_v1 -t ./thrift/service.thrift
tcurl -p 127.0.0.1:21300 my-service MyService::health_v1 -t ./thrift/service.thrift

You can tcurl it directly at localhost:9000 or tcurl it through Hyperbahn at 127.0.0.1:21300. If you're unfamiliar with tcurl, the command-line tool to call TChannel servers, learn about it here.

Once a service is available on Hyperbahn, any other service on that Hyperbahn cluster can talk to it.

Installation

npm install hyperbahn

Running the tests

git clone git@github.com:uber/hyperbahn
cd hyperbahn
npm install
npm test

MIT Licensed

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Package last updated on 17 Aug 2016

hyperbahn

Overview