Open Source XMPP for Cloud Services

Open Source XMPP for Cloud Services Matt Tucker, CTO Jive Software

Who am I?

Member of the XMPP Standards Foundation and former chair of the board

Behind Smack and Openfire at igniterealtime.org

Keep giving talks about XMPP at OSCON…

In This Talk

Brief XMPP and cloud computing overview

Problems in cloud architectures; how XMPP can help

Open Source tools

Tips and tricks

XMPP (Jabber) Overview

The open protocol for instant messaging (it’s fair to declare victory)

IETF standard and a robust org developing the protocol: XMPP Standards Foundation

Simple for developers and very deep Open Source toolset and heritage

XMPP Building Blocks <iq to=‘weather.jivesoftware.com’ type=‘get’ id=‘123’><query xmlns=‘jabber:weather’><city>pdx</city></query></iq> <iq from=‘weather.jivesoftware.com’> type=‘result’ id=‘123’><query xmlns=‘jabber:weather’><weather>Not Raining!</weather></query></iq> Exchange information and perform queries using a request / response protocol. IQ <message to='matt@jivesoftware.com' from='gato@igniterealtime.org’> <body>How's that presentation going?</body> </message> Send data between users Message <presence from=‘matt@jivesoftware.com’> <status>Giving a talk...</status> </presence> Send presence data or manage presence subscriptions Presence Example Description

What is Cloud Computing?

Predominately based on web services (SOAP, REST, etc)

Exploding in popularity – a critical trend of software architectures

Started with simple services; now growing complex

Cloud Service Example: Salesforce.com

Uses SOAP (not XML-RPC or REST)

Huge percentage of traffic is polling for updates

Introduced “Outbound Messaging” to cope with polling – but there are firewall issues

Cloud Architecture Problems

Polling doesn’t scale and isn’t real-time

Need two-way data exchange with easy firewall traversal

Web services are feature poor (presence, binary data, etc)

SOAP is what’s needed for complex services, but it’s overly complicated

Thesis: web services are great for simple cloud services; XMPP is better for complex cloud services

XMPP vs. SOAP Ubiquity Innovative Features Ease Security Performance SOAP XMPP

XMPP Cloud Architecture

Open Source Tools: Server

Openfire

Most popular XMPP server, with over 1 million downloads

In production with many cloud services

Massively scalable

Support for even strict firewall environments -- BOSH

Open Source Tools: Client APIs

Dozens of libraries in every major programming language – start at jabber.org

Java: Smack library from igniterealtime.org

Flex: XIFF library from igniterealtime.org

Javascript: JSJac, dojox.xmpp

Open Source Tools: Cloud Components

Whack (Java) – simple and high level API

Components use XEP-114 (easy)

ExternalWeatherComponent.java

public class ExternalWeatherComponent {

public static void main(String[] args) {

ExternalComponentManager manager =

new ExternalComponentManager("example.com", 5275);

// Set the secret key for this component, for authentication

manager.setSecretKey("weather", "test");

// Register this component to a subdomain of the server

manager.addComponent("weather", new WeatherComponent());

//... Component will now start processing requests

}

}

WeatherComponent.java

public class WeatherComponent implements Component {

public String getName() {

return "US Weather";

}

public void processPacket(Packet packet) {

// Get the request packet here, parse it and return a reply

}

public void initialize(JID jid, ComponentManager componentManager) {

}

public void shutdown() {

}

}

Example: Clearspace Doc Sharing

Example: Twitter Fire Hose

Uses XMPP to provide access to all status updates, which would be impossible using web services polling

Only provided to a small number of services (most recently Gnip)

Openfire Cloud Services: Tips and Tricks

External components allow for hot-deploy of new or updated services

Run on separate hardware for scalability

Openfire allows components to connect multiple times for scalability and redundancy

Epoll on Linux provides great performance

Ad-hoc command available to listen for all traffic

Use XMPP federation for federating cloud services

Questions?

Blog Entry Link

Email/IM: [email_address]

www.igniterealtime.org

Open Source XMPP for Cloud Services

0 comments

Notes on slide 1

22 Favorites & 1 Group