Skip to main content

How To Expose the Guts of Twitter (A post about Starling)

Twitter does a lot of queuing. I mean, a lot. We know other people have a need for some good queuing, so much that Amazon even released Amazon Queue Service, not so long ago. There has never really been a common queue server, and maybe that is because its so simple that no one has really had the need to push one hard into the public eye. At least, as public as our eyes are.

Enter Starling, the internal queue system of Twitter, recently released to the public. Written in Ruby, and I don't even mind! Pointed there by my ever-pointing buddy, David Novakovic, Starling does nothing absolutely remarkable, but someone has to get the light. What is interesting is their choices. Starling uses the MemCached protocol, so your clients are probably already prepared to use it, they just need to treat the queues a little different from the mappings. The typical MemCached get-operation now removes the item from the queue. The keys function is identifiers for the queues. I don't think it could have been simpler. I'm planning to look at setting up Starling for testing on my linux servers and my Macbook, and to try and find something interesting in the way of using it. I have some plans I could utilize it in, and maybe bring it to the office later.

Now that Starling has some attention and gives us something of a standard for queue protocols (I love reusing protocols!), if anyone has different needs or just wants to scratch an itch in their language of choice, lets make the smart move and take the same protocol route. Queues may be a small thing, but its the same things we really need to agree on more. Anyone up for a MemCached-protocol to Amazon Queue Service bridge?
Labels:

Comments

J said…
I wouldn't say that distributed, "reliable", low-latency queuing is exactly simple, although the concept is...

But also check out XMPP (which does wonderful queuing and presence) and AMQP... XMPP is well represented by ejabberd (Erlang), jabberd, etc.. AMQP is more-or-less represented by Apache ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, etc. AMQP is more traditional, whereas XMPP is more SQS style.

https://stpeter.im/?p=2099
7:17 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...
Post a Comment
Read more