Architecture
This chapter contains high view of Hermes architecture. It should give you basic idea of how Hermes operates and connects to other systems. Each mentioned mechanism has own chapter that describes it in-depth, please refer to them for more details.
Hermes is message broker using Kafka as message storage and routing backed. It consists of three modules:
- Hermes Frontend - receives traffic (messages) from clients, see: publishing
- Hermes Consumers - sends messages to subscribers (push model), see: subscribing
- Hermes Management - manage topics and subscriptions
Hermes integrates with multiple systems, each having different role.
- Message Store - stores and routes messages, current implementation: Kafka
- Metadata Store - shared metadata storage for all Hermes modules, current implementation: Zookeeper
- Metrics Store [optional] - stores metrics gathered by Hermes, current implementation: Graphite
- Tracking Store [optional] - stores tracking (message trace) information, current implementations: ElasticSearch, MongoDB
Message flow
- publisher publishes message on given topic to Frontend
- Frontend:
- message is assigned unique Hermes-Message-Id that can be used to track its way through the system
- each action time is metered, metrics are sent to Metrics Store
- if topic has tracing enabled, tracking information is sent to Tracking Store
- message is sent to Message Store
- Consumers sends message to subscriber:
- message is read from Message Store
- each action time is metered, metrics are sent to Metrics Store
- if subscription has tracing enabled, tracking information is sent to Tracking Store
- message is sent to subscriber
- in case of subscriber error, Consumer adjust sending speed and retries