RSocket: Reactive Streaming Service Networking with Ryland Degnan

Netflix has thousands of service instances communicating with each other. When a Netflix client on a smartphone makes a request for a movie, that request hits Netflix’s backend, where the request is fulfilled by a chain of requests through different services.

Services and clients communicate using several different interaction patterns. A service might send a single request and expect a single response. Or it might fire and forget, not expecting a response. A service also might send a single request and expect a stream of messages to be sent back over the network. In a highly interactive application like Netflix, there is a frequent use of “streams” of data.

RSocket is a protocol that makes reactive streams easier to work with. Ryland Degnan is the CTO of Netifi, and he joins the show to discuss reactive streams and service-to-service networking. Ryland worked at Netflix on the Edge Platform team for four years, and he shares his experience working at Netflix, the challenges of networking at scale, and the company he is building around RSocket.

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