Spring Update 🚲

Hey Finaglers,

Spring has sprung, and we’re beginning to ease into summer. 🚲season has begun in New York City! We’ve been busy little bees, and this review comes a little bit late, so it won’t include all of the work we’ve done since the last review, but instead just has the work from January, February, and March. For a sneak peak on what will be in our next quarterly review, you can check out our changelogs!

HTTP

We’ve added support for trailing headers to our HTTP implementation. Although trailers were once considered fringe, especially since no browser supports trailers, and vanishingly few CDNs or webservers do, trailers have in the last few years gained significant traction because gRPC uses them for signaling stream errors. Trailers are an important piece in the puzzle in making finagle-http compatible with remote peers that speak the gRPC protocol.

Header validation support was reworked in Finagle, so that it is now totally RFC-7230-compliant. This will give us higher confidence that we are writing spec-compliant HTTP clients and servers.

Runtime

ConstFuture performance has significantly improved, which is important given how often we use futures that are already satisfied. In particular, we have made Future#map and Future#flatMap substantially faster.

Composed Filter performance is much faster now that we’ve optimized the way that error handling works.

We are also proud to announce we have enabled client-side nack admission control to shed load automatically in overload scenarios. This work was largely inspired by the client-side throttling section of the overload chapter in the Google SRE book.

Rewrote streaming parsing of JSON in Finatra to rely on Jackson’s asynchronous parsing. This gets us out of the JSON parsing business, so that we can focus more on our other business.

Developer Experience

com.twitter.io.Reader has many much-needed utilities, including Reader#flatten and Reader.fromSeq. We think that Reader is now broadly appropriate for object streaming, and encourage users to consider it for their future streaming needs.

Added the “dtab.add” flag to TwitterServer and Finatra, so that if there are any dtabs you want to add to your server, you can specify them as command line arguments when you start your server.

Continued the flurry of tracing improvements, including adding annotations for backup requests, and for garbage collection events. We also added tracing annotations for serde in scrooge, and added the rpc method name as an annotation to scrooge spans.

OpenCensus / gRPC Compatibility

We partnered with another team inside of Twitter to bring their work in making Finagle compatible with OpenCensus and gRPC to Finagle. This has resulted in adding support for gRPC contexts in finagle-grpc-context, OpenCensus tracing in finagle-opencensus-tracing, and zPages exporting support in TwitterServer’s opencensus module, which now provides a ZPagesAdminRoutes mixin.

Technical Debt

We finally no longer depend on Netty 3 in any of Finagle! It has been a five year(!) journey to get here, and we are extremely pleased to have finally arrived. And now we can’t wait until Netty 5 gets released, so that we can start the next migration!

Completely deleted util-collection, which may be sad for long-time util-collection users, but lets them move to the just as good (or better!) tools provided by the JDK.

Renamed all public “blacklist” and “whitelist” identifiers to instead be called “denylist” and “allowlist” (or “acceptlist”), which helps move our libraries into the 21st century.

Thanks for following along. If you’d like to know more about any one of these updates, or if you have a question about them, join us on the Finagle or Finatra mailing lists or hop on Gitter.

Stay cool,

Moses and the Core Systems Libraries team