CODEWITHSUNDEEP
akkadistributed-computingjgroupsakka-cluster
Konstantin Solomatov
Konstantin Solomatov

Reputation: 10352

Alternatives to JGroups

I want to create a distributed applications on JVM which has a number of nodes, and need a library which allow me to:

I have found two solutions:

Are there any other libraries which can do the same?

Upvotes: 16

Views: 10647

Answers (4)

Vatel
Vatel

Reputation: 106

Are there any other libraries which can do the same?

Apache Zookeeper. Never used it myself but heard about it.

Personally, I used JGroups for several years. At the beginning it was unstable - my TCP-based cluster of ~ 10 nodes was broken several times per week (separated to subclusters), but later Bela Ban has improved the library, it worked well.

My 5 cents to "JGroups vs Akka":

  • Akka Cluster config is simpler, not so "deep" as JGroups' one
  • Akka Cluster uses non-blocking I/O for communication (currently on top of Netty), JGroups always used blocking TCP sockets (this may be critical for large clusters; but there is also UDP in JGroups... But UDP is not always applicable...)
  • Akka Cluster provides more high-level things like cluster-aware routers & distributed PubSub which are integrated well with Actors (of course if you like Akka & Actors)
  • Akka Cluster covers most of use-cases, but not all: look into our discussion some time ago: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/akka-dev/WUsi6qfV5BU

Upvotes: 7

Nishanth
Nishanth

Reputation: 51

My 2 cents. I have used JGroups in my project to achieve similar requirements. The env is about 60 nodes, which is a bit small, but we have a ton of activity between the nodes (about 1MM messages pd). JGroups has been great, because its network configuration is really flexible and quite stable. There are a few things you might learn the hard way when you configure JGroups for a cluster split over different data centers/LANs and even VLANs, as there is not a lot of user activity on the JGroups, unlike the other newer options that are available now. If you have the time to play around with it and have a comparable QA/Staging env to your production, I think JGroups is a very good option.

Upvotes: 5

Bela Ban
Bela Ban

Reputation: 2186

If you go by the number of stars on GitHub then other projects (Cassandra, Riak, Hadoop etc) would win out over JGroups, too... :-) I'd prototype on JGroups and Aka, and then pick the solution which works best for you (perf, functionality, simplicity etc). Cheers,

Upvotes: 5

Bela Ban
Bela Ban

Reputation: 2186

JGroups has been around since 1998 and is therefore very stable, not dated at all ! It is being actively developed (I'm the lead dev).

It is used by a lot of applications/systems out there, if you google for it, you'll find a lot of references. Just this week, a telecom company using it broke the record for largest cluster built with JGroups with a 1115 node cluster !

JBoss (Wildfly) clustering (Infinispan) uses JGroups as well. I suggest write a small prototype and see how it performs. If you ask questions on the JGroups mailing list, the people there are very helpful...

I can't comment on Akka, as I haven't used it, but my distaste for Scala would keep me away from it anyway...

Upvotes: 34

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