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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?
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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
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