May is a month rife with graduations, and Apache Dubbo, an open-source remote procedure call framework based on Java, is getting its turn as it graduates from the Apache Incubator to a Top-Level Project (TLP).
The project was originally developed at Alibaba and open sourced in 2011. It entered the Apache Incubator, the gateway to becoming an official ASF project, early last year.
The Dubbo framework can specify the methods that can be called remotely across distributed or microservice systems, and its primary functionalities are: interface-based remote call; fault tolerance and load balancing; and automatic service registration and discovery, according to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).
Other projects that recently joined the TLP ranks include Apache Unom, a standards-based, customer data platform, and Apache Airflow, scalable workflow automation and scheduling system for authoring and managing Big Data.
Dubbo features include:
- Transparent interface based RPC – Provides high-performance interface based RPC, which is transparent to users.
- Intelligent load balancing – Supports multiple load balancing strategies out of the box, which perceives downstream service status to reduce overall latency and improve system throughput.
- Automatic service registration and discovery – Supports multiple service registries that can detect service online/offline instantly.
- High extensibility – Micro-kernel and plugin design ensures that it can easily be extended by third-party implementation across core features like protocol, transport, and serialization.
- Runtime traffic routing – Can be configured at runtime so that traffic can be routed according to different rules, which makes it easy to support features such as blue-green deployment, data center aware routing, etc.
- Visualized service governance – Provides rich tools for service governance and maintenance such as querying service metadata, health status, and statistics.
