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In 5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS, Netflix's John Ciancutti says one of the big lessons they've learned is to create less chatty protocols:
In the Netflix data centers, we have a high capacity, super fast, highly reliable network. This has afforded us the luxury of designing around chatty APIs to remote systems. AWS networking has more variable latency. We’ve had to be much more structured about “over the wire” interactions, even as we’ve transitioned to a more highly distributed architecture.
There's not a lot of advice out there on how to create protocols. Combine that with a rush to the cloud and you have a perfect storm for chatty applications crushing application performance. Netflix is far from the first to be surprised by the less than stellar networks inside AWS.
A chatty protocol is one where a client makes a series of requests to a server and the client must wait on each reply before sending the next request. On a LAN this can work great. LAN's are typically fast, wide, and drop few packets.
Move that same application to a different network, one where round trip times can easily be an order of magnitude or larger because either the network is slow, lossy or poorly designed, and if a protocol takes many requests to complete a transaction, then it will make a dramatic difference in performance.
My WAN acceleration friends says Microsoft's Common Internet File System (CIFS) is infamous for being chatty. Transferring a 30MB file could tally something like 300msecs of latency on a LAN. On a WAN that could stretch to 7 minutes. Very unexpected results. What is key here is how the quality characteristics of the pipe interacts with the protocol design.
OK, chatty protocols are bad. What can you do about it?
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