We have been writing about the possibilities for a request/response transport paradigm (as an alternative to TCP's reliable byte stream) since the 1990s, and yet we seem to keep finding new angles to approach the problem. We’re not sure yet if there is a whole book in this topic, but we certainly have enough material for this week’s newsletter and probably more to come.| systemsapproach.substack.com
Homa is a new transport protocol for modern datacenters. It was designed in a clean-slate fashion to meet the needs of large scale datacenter applications, and its design is quite different from TCP. Although TCP has a long and illustrious history, virtually every aspect of its design is wrong for the datacenter. As a result, TCP suffers from serious performance problems and it limits the scalability of applications. Homa differs from TCP in every major aspect of its design, and this combinat...| homa-transport.atlassian.net