http-broadcast

HTTP Broadcast

A scalable and fault resilient HTTP Broadcaster built on top of mercure able to forward an HTTP request to several servers without the need to maintain a registry.

This project has been initialized in order to invalidate a cluster of docker varnish servers.

Description

Each HTTP request sent to a listening http-broadcast is pushed into a mercure HUB, then dispatched to all listening http-broadcast who'll replay the same request.

Use cases

Example of usage: Send PURGE/BAN requests to a cluster of Varnish containers.

The solution will be to embed a http-broadcast binary alongside each Varnish instance (One could use the Inter-container network communication provided by Kubernetes Pods). By sending a single request to one varnish container, the http-broadcast will take care to dispatch the same request to all varnish instances.

Benefits

• No need to maintain an index: each server is allowed to start and die without to be registered somewhere
• Fault tolerant: if a server is temporary unreachable (network issue for instance), messages won't be lost: all missed messages will be re-played once recovered.
• Scalable: dealing with 1 or 2 000 servers is transparent for the client, it has a single request to perform.
• Network secured: Servers don't have to be exposed to the client which is complex to set up when the servers are located in different region of the world.

Documentation

• Getting started.
• Full documentation.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.