Postoffice

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What's Postoffice?

We can think about Postoffice as a real post office. You send messages to a topic and publishers send them to anyone interested in this topic. In case the receiver is not available, Postoffice will try to deliver the message later. Postoffice uses a pub/sub approach, so instead of handling receiver's addresses it uses topics, to which receivers must subscribe through Publishers. A publisher is isolated from others and it handles itself its own pending messages.

Motivation

This project started as a solution to buffer messages in case some apps are deployed on-premise and could suffer connectivity issues. Then it evolved to also offer a pub/sub mechanism.

What's not Postoffice?

This is not designed to be realtime. Postoffice uses GenStage to process pending messages, creating a process tree for each Publisher. It looks like an ETL, and it's refreshed every 10 seconds.

Features

• Buffer messages in case the receiver system is down or there is no connectivity for some reason.
• Deliver messages through:
  • Http.
  • Pub/Sub (GCloud).
• API to create topics/publishers.
• Web interface:
  • Manage topics/publishers.
  • Search messages to see when it was received and processed.
• Cluster nodes. Best effort to avoid sending messages more than once. (More info on clustering later)
• Endpoint to be used as health-check from k8s /api/health

API

We expose an API to enable projects to create the structure they need to work: topics, publishers and messages. For both topics and publishers, if the resource already exist we return 409 Conflict. In case that another validation error happened, we return 400 bad request

Topics

Here we have a sample request to create a topic. All fields are required

POST /api/topics
{
  "name": "example-topic",
  "origin_host": sender_service.com
}

Attributes:

• name: topic name, it's what publishers will use to subscribe.
• origin_host: Host URL where messages for this topic will come from. This will used in a future feature to recover undelivered messages.

Publishers

Publishers creation example. The only non required field is from_now

POST /api/publishers
{
  "active": True,
  "topic": "example-topic",
  "target": "http://myservice.com/examples",
  "type": "http/pubsub",
  "from_now": True
}

Attributes:

• active: if this publisher is active and must check and send pending messages or not.
• topic: from which topic this publisher should take messages.
• target: the endpoint where the post request with the message will be done.
• type: We now support two different types of publishers.
  • http: the messages are sent via POST request to a target url.
  • pubsub: messages are published to a target topic on GCloud Pub/Sub service.
• from_now: This param controls if you want to receive messages from this topic from now or in the other hand you're interested in the complete topic's messages.

Messages

Message creation example. All fields are required

POST /api/messages
{
  "topic": topic,
  "payload": {},
  "attributes": {}
}

Attributes:

• topic: to which topic the message should be associated.
• payload: the message body.
• attributes: for pubsub publishers this attributes are added as GCloud Pub/Sub has this option. All attributes should be strings.

How to install it locally

To start your Phoenix server:

• brew update
• brew install elixir
• Create the following environmet variables in order to start the application:
  • GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS with the absolute path to the pubsub credentials file. We provide config/dummy-credentials.json to be able to start the app.
  • GCLOUD_PUBSUB_PROJECT_ID with the project_id used.
• mix local.hex
• mix archive.install hex phx_new 1.4.11
• Install dependencies with mix deps.get
• Inside docker directory, run docker-compose up -d to start a new postgres database
• Create and migrate your database with mix ecto.setup
• Execute npm install inside assets/
• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.

Clustering

Postoffice has been developed to be used forming a cluster. We use libcluster under the hood to create the cluster. You can take a look at its documentation in case you want to tune settings.

What's next?

Some desired features have been delayed until the first release:

• Be able to configure max_demand through environment variables.
• Provide a mechanism to run schema migrations.
• Do not try to create a k8s cluster by default, change how it's configured.
• Create docker images to make it easier to run Postoffice.