Spring Update 2021 🚲

Hey Finaglers,

Spring has sprung and the time has come ⏰ to update you on all of the exciting changes we’ve been making. Here’s our quarterly review for Q1 2021, highlighting our work in January, February, and March!

Without further ado, here’s our recap:

🎉 Our libraries all now cross-build with Scala 2.13! As of the 21.3.0 release, we’ve dropped build support for 2.11, focusing on Scala 2.12+.

Finagle

Investing in our Offload Filter has paid large performance dividends. And we are finding even more ways to make our services more performant! We’ve introduced a new flag, c.t.f.offload.auto, that enables offloading functionality with good defaults to avoid the tuning processes. Our latest efforts have revolved around introducing an offload admission controller.

Finagle has been migrated to make use of the new Backoff APIs. Microbenchmarks that traverse the new implementation have shown a 52% allocation improvement compared to the Stream based implementation.

Finagle-Mysql has added support for opportunistic TLS! Mysql clients can fallback to plain-text if the server does not support TLS connections.

Kerberos authentication can be incorporated more naturally in Finagle http clients and servers with built-in configuration APIs.

Aperture eager connections is enabled by default for the aperture load balancers! New configuration knobs were added to support eager connections in balancers created due to request-level d-tabs.

We’re always looking to improve our APIs and add features to improve your experience with Finagle. This included introducing a new ResponseClassifier to treat request timeouts as ignorable, useful for low-timeout clients where responses are “best-effort”. Finagle’s “failures” counter was changed to be created eagerly so the counter’s value is 0 in the absence of failures. Stay tuned for more!

Finatra

ThriftMethodBuilder added support for including per-method retry configuration. Finatra kafka-streams AsyncTransformer supports using thread pools for CPU-bound workloads.

We are committed to improving the user experience for our Finatra users and have introduced the finatra/http-core project. Containing common artifacts for the finatra/http-server and finatra/http-client project. The shared code will allow us to provide greater feature parity between the client and server implementations, as well as iterate and introduce new features for Finatra services in a maintainable way.

Till next time,

Hamdi (on behalf of CSL)