Do we really need another messaging system? We might if it promises to move millions of messages a second, at small microsecond latencies between machines, with consistent response times, to large numbers of clients, using an innovative design.  

And that’s the promise of Aeron (the Celtic god of battle, not the chair, though tell that to the search engines), a new high-performance open source message transport library from the team of Todd Montgomery, a multicast and reliable protocol expert, Richard Warburton, an expert on compiler optimizations, and Martin Thompson, the pasty faced performance gangster.

The claims are Aeron is already beating the best products out there on throughput and latency matches the best commercial products up to the 90th percentile. Aeron can push small 40 byte messages at 6 million messages a second, which is a very difficult case.

Here’s a talk Martin gave on Aeron at Strangeloop: Aeron: Open-source high-performance messaging. I’ll give a gloss of his talk as well as integrating in sources of information listed at the end of this article.

Martin and his team were in the enviable position of having a client that required a product like Aeron and was willing to both finance its development while also making it open source. So go git Aeron on GitHub. Note, it’s early days for Aeron and they are still in the heavy optimization phase.

The world has changed therefore endpoints need to scale as never before. This is why Martin says we need a new messaging system. It’s now a multi-everything world. We have multi-core, multi-socket, multi-cloud, multi-billion user computing, where communication is happening all the time. Huge numbers of consumers regularly pound a channel to read from same publisher, which causes lock contention, queueing effects, which causes throughput to drop and latency to spike. 

What’s needed is a new messaging library to make the most of this new world. The move to microservices only heightens the need:

As we move to a world of micro services then we need very low and predictable latency from our communications otherwise the coherence component of USL will come to rain fire and brimstone on our designs.

With Aeron the goal is to keep things pure and focused. The benchmarking we have done so far suggests a step forward in throughput and latency. What is quite unique is that you do not have to choose between throughput and latency. With other high-end messaging transports this is a distinct choice. The algorithms employed by Aeron give maximum throughput while minimising latency up until saturation.

“Many messaging products are a Swiss Army knife; Aeron is a scalpel,” says Martin, which is a good way to understand Aeron. It’s not a full featured messaging product in the way you may be used to, like Kafka. Aeron does not persist messages, it doesn’t support guaranteed delivery, nor clustering, nor does it support topics. Aeron won’t know if a client has crashed and be able to sync it back up from history or initialize a new client from history. 

The best way to place Aeron in your mental matrix might be as a message oriented replacement for TCP, with higher level services written on top. Todd Montgomery expands on this idea:

Aeron being an ISO layer 4 protocol provides a number of things that messaging systems can't and also doesn't provide several things that some messaging systems do.... if that makes any sense. Let me explain slightly more wrt all typical messaging systems (not just Kafka and 0MQ). 

One way to think more about where Aeron fits is TCP, but with the option of reliable multicast delivery. However, that is a little limited in that Aeron also, by design, has a number of possible uses that go well beyond what TCP can do. Here are a few things to consider: 

Todd continues on with more detail, so please keep reading the article to see more on the subject.

At its core Aeron is a replicated persistent log of messages. And through a very conscious design process messages are wait-free and zero-copy along the entire path from publication to reception. This means latency is very good and very predictable.

That sums up Aeron is nutshell. It was created by an experienced team, using solid design principles sharpened on many previous projects, backed by techniques not everyone has in their tool chest. Every aspect has been well thought out to be clean, simple, highly performant, and highly concurrent.

If simplicity is indistinguishable from cleverness, then there’s a lot of cleverness going on in Aeron. Let’s see how they did it...