grpc and zeromq comparsion

Question

I'd like to compare somehow capabilities of grpc vs. zeromq & its patterns: and I'd like to create some comparsion (feature set) - somehow - 0mq is "better" sockets - but anyways - if I apply 0mq patterns - I get comparable 'frameworks' I think - and here 0mq seems to be much more flexible ...

The main requirements are:

• async req / res communication (inproc or remote) between nodes
• flexible messages routing
• loadbalancing support
• well documented

any ideas?

thanks!

Answer 1

• async req / res communication (inproc or remote) between nodes

Both libraries allow for synchronous or asynchronous communication depending on how to implement the communication. See this page for gRPC: http://www.grpc.io/docs/guides/concepts.html. Basically gRPC allow for typical HTTP synchronous request/response or a 'websocket-like' bidirectional streaming. For 0mq you can setup a simple REQ-REP connection which is basically a synchronous communication path, or you can create async ROUTER-DEALER type topologies.

• flexible messages routing

'Routing' essentially means that a message gets from A to B via some broker. This is trivially done in 0mq and there are a number of topologies that support stuff like this (http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#Basic-Reliable-Queuing-Simple-Pirate-Pattern). In gRPC the same sort of topology could be created with a 'pub-sub' like connection over a stream. gRPC supports putting metadata in the message (https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/blob/master/Documentation/grpc-metadata.md) which will allow you to 'route' a message into a queue that a 'pub-sub' connection could pull from.

• loadbalancing support

gRPC has a health check support (https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/health-checking.md) but because it's HTTP/2 you'd have to have a HTTP/2 load balancer to support the health check. This isn't a huge big deal, however, because you can tie the health check to a HTTP/1.1 service which the load balancer calls. 0mq is a tcp connection which means that a load balancer would likely check a 'socket connect' in tcpmode to verify the connection. This works but it's not as nice. Again you could get slick and front-end the 0mq service with a HTTP/1.1 webserver that the load balancer reads from.

• well documented

both are well documented. 0mq's documentation must be read to throughly understand the technology and is more of a higher lift.

Here's the big differences:

1. 0mq is a tcp protocol whereas gRPC is HTTP with a binary payload.
2. 0mq requries you design a framing protocol (frame 1 = verison, frame 2 = payload, etc.), whereas much of this work is done for you in gRPC
3. gRPC is transparently coverted to REST (https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway) whereas 0mq requires a middleware application if you want to talk REST to it.
4. gRPC uses standard tls x509 certificates (think websites) whereas 0mq uses a custom encryption/authentication protocol (http://curvezmq.org/). Prior to 4.x there was no encryption support in 0mq and if you really wanted it you had to dive into this crap: https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/BIO. (trust me don't do it)
5. 0mq can create some pretty sick topologies (https://github.com/zeromq/majordomo) (https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:7/MDP/) whereas gRPC is basically client/server
6. 0mq requires much more time to build and get running whereas gRPC is basically compiling a protobuf messages and importing the service into your code.