Open Source XMPP for Cloud Services

1. Open Source XMPP for Cloud Services Matt Tucker, CTO Jive Software

2. Who am I? • Member of the XMPP Standards Foundation and former chair of the board • Behind Smack and Openfire at igniterealtime.org • Keep giving talks about XMPP at OSCON…

4. In This Talk • Brief XMPP and cloud computing overview • Problems in cloud architectures; how XMPP can help • Open Source tools • Tips and tricks

5. XMPP (Jabber) Overview • The open protocol for instant messaging (it’s fair to declare victory) • IETF standard and a robust org developing the protocol: XMPP Standards Foundation • Simple for developers and very deep Open Source toolset and heritage

6. XMPP Building Blocks

7. What is Cloud Computing? • Predominately based on web services (SOAP, REST, etc) • Exploding in popularity – a critical trend of software architectures • Started with simple services; now growing complex

8. Cloud Service Example: Salesforce.com • Uses SOAP (not XML-RPC or REST) • Huge percentage of traffic is polling for updates • Introduced “Outbound Messaging” to cope with polling – but there are firewall issues

9. Cloud Architecture Problems • Polling doesn’t scale and isn’t real-time • Need two-way data exchange with easy firewall traversal • Web services are feature poor (presence, binary data, etc) • SOAP is what’s needed for complex services, but it’s overly complicated Thesis: web services are great for simple cloud services; XMPP is better for complex cloud services

10. XMPP vs. SOAP

11. XMPP Cloud Architecture

12. Open Source Tools: Server • Openfire • Most popular XMPP server, with over 1 million downloads • In production with many cloud services • Massively scalable • Support for even strict firewall environments -- BOSH

13. Open Source Tools: Client APIs • Dozens of libraries in every major programming language – start at jabber.org • Java: Smack library from igniterealtime.org • Flex: XIFF library from igniterealtime.org • Javascript: JSJac, dojox.xmpp

14. Open Source Tools: Cloud Components • Whack (Java) – simple and high level API • Components use XEP-114 (easy)

15. ExternalWeatherComponent.java public class ExternalWeatherComponent { public static void main(String[] args) { ExternalComponentManager manager = new ExternalComponentManager("example.com", 5275); // Set the secret key for this component, for authentication manager.setSecretKey("weather", "test"); // Register this component to a subdomain of the server manager.addComponent("weather", new WeatherComponent()); //... Component will now start processing requests } }

16. WeatherComponent.java public class WeatherComponent implements Component { public String getName() { return "US Weather"; } public void processPacket(Packet packet) { // Get the request packet here, parse it and return a reply } public void initialize(JID jid, ComponentManager componentManager) { } public void shutdown() { } }

17. Example: Clearspace Doc Sharing

18. Example: Twitter Fire Hose • Uses XMPP to provide access to all status updates, which would be impossible using web services polling • Only provided to a smallnumber of services (mostrecently Gnip)

19. Openfire Cloud Services: Tips and Tricks • External components allow for hot-deploy of new or updated services • Run on separate hardware for scalability • Openfire allows components to connect multiple times for scalability and redundancy • Epoll on Linux provides great performance • Ad-hoc command available to listen for all traffic • Use XMPP federation for federating cloud services

20. Questions? Blog Entry Link Email/IM: matt@jivesoftware.com www.igniterealtime.org