HMhm8·Dec 27, 2016Submission
TChannel: Uber's protocol for service discovery
3 points · Open discussionuber
tchannel
Thrift2015–2016
uber / tchannel · Archived
tchannel
network multiplexing and framing protocol for RPC
2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
network multiplexing and framing protocol for RPC
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month2 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-10-22 01:08:29 UTC to 2016-12-27 17:30:35 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2015 | 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Nov 2015 | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2015 | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2016 | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2016 | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2016 | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2016 | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2016 | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2016 | 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2016 | 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2016 | 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2016 | 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2016 | 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2016 | 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesIDLs are awesomely useful and you can build all sorts of things on that abstraction, especially if you have a parser that produces a standard AST (I wrote a PegJS parser that takes the Thrift IDLs and creates a plain old javascript object AST that can be used for things like: (1) writing dynamic serializers/deserializers for binary data (uber/thriftrw), (2) validators (not yet written, but will both lint as well as check for backwards compatibility when IDLs are updated); (3) bash autocompletion for an RPC api via a curl-like command (soon to land in uber/tcurl))
At Uber, we started with Apache Thrift, but found many things about it limited and broken with dubious code quality for some languages. Furthermore we had more ambitious ideas like application layer sharding (uber/ringpop) and service discovery and routing (uber/hyperbahn).
We're
Read the rest
still using the thrift protocols (uber/thriftrw) with our rpc library (uber/tchannel), but could have built on top of another IDL format like protobufs (v3).
For those curious about the RPC interface, just check out: https://tchannel.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
The interface supports all sorts of things
This is all over TCP right now and designed for performance and service to service communication, but there is nothing preventing the addition of HTTP (via XHR or WebSockets) as a transport for allowing web apps to speak with tchannel services. I contributed to the Apache Thrift implementation that allows this (https://github.com/apache/thrift/blob/master/lib/nodejs/lib/...). The implementation for tchannel would be similar, but rely on XHR/WS in the browser and the `http` module instead of the `net` module in NodeJS on the server. It's trivial to write a proxy frontend that relays TJSONProtocol on the frontend to a Thrift binary protocol like TBinaryProtocol or TCompactProtocol.
https://github.com/uber/hyperbahn
https://github.com/uber/tchannel
https://github.com/uber/ringpop-node
https://github.com/uber/ringpop-go
https://github.com/uber/idl
https://github.com/uber/tcurl
https://github.com/uber/tcap
etc.