Fueling innovative software
July 15-18, 2019
Portland, OR

Real-time streaming APIs: From data center to internet clients

Wenbo Zhu (Google)
4:15pm4:55pm Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Secondary topics:  Data Driven
Average rating: **...
(2.67, 9 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • API developers, architects, and software engineers

Level

Intermediate

Description

When designing APIs such as the new GCP Firestore real-time database and Google Assistant, Google often focuses on the semantics of the underlying service and tries to avoid introducing any messaging-layer semantics such as failure recovery and resumption support.

Wenbo Zhu dives deep into the lessons learned deploying a public cloud API designed for data center clients that will be consumed by a variety of internet clients. It’s important to decide how to make those design trade-offs and avoid the need to support two different sets of APIs, which would be difficult to maintain. The solution often comes down to a rich client library to minimize the overhead or complexity, which would otherwise be forced to data center clients.

Prerequisite knowledge

  • General knowledge of API design, messaging semantics such as pub/sub, and internet and microservice protocols such as HTTP, gRPC, and WebSockets

What you'll learn

  • Discover lessons and insights on how to design real-time streaming APIs that may be consumed by both datacenter applications and internet-facing applications
Photo of Wenbo Zhu

Wenbo Zhu

Google

Wenbo Zhu is a software engineer at Google, where he is responsible for Google’s frontend networking frameworks. His current work involves building scalable and robust real-time messaging stacks for internet clients to interact with cloud services. He has also contributed to various web protocol-related standards and open source projects. Wenbo holds a PhD in computer engineering. He is the author of the so-called COLOR algorithm for managing performance and consistency trade-offs of geographically replicated cloud services.