Are websockets a suitable lowest latency and robust real-time communication protocol between two nearby servers in the same AWS Availability Zones?

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Suitable technologies I am aware of:

  • Websockets
  • Zeromq

Please suggest others if they are a better fit for my problem.

For this use case I have just two machines, the sender and the receiver, and it's important to note they are fixed "nearby" each other, as they will be in the same availability zone on AWS. Answers which potentially relate to message passing over large spans of the internet aren't necessarily applicable. Note also the receiver server isn't queuing these up as tasks, it will just be forwarding select message feeds to website visitors over a websocket. The sending server does a lot of pre-processing and collating to the messages.

The solution needs to:

  1. Be very high throughput. At present the sending server is processing about 10,000 messages per second (written in Rust) without breaking a sweat. Bursty traffic may increase this up to 20,000 or a bit more. I know zeromq can handle this.

  2. Robust. The communication pipe will be open 24/7 365 days per year. My budget is extremely limited in terms of setting up clusters of machines as failovers so I have to do the best I can with two machines.

  3. Message durability isn't required or a concern, the receiving server isn't required to store anything, it just needs all the data. The sender server asynchronously writes a durable 5 second summary of the data to a database and to a cache.

  4. Messages must retain the order in which they are sent.

  5. Low latency. This is very important as the data needs to be as realtime as possible.

A websocket seems to get this job done for 1 to 4. What I don't know is how robust a websocket is for communication that's 24 hours a day 7 days a week. I've observed websocket connections getting dropped online in general (Of course I will write re-connect code, heartbeat mointoring if required but still this concerns me). I also wonder if the high throughput is too much for the websocket.

I have zero experience in this kind of problem but I have a very good websocket library that I'm comfortable using. I ruled out Apache Kafka as it seems expensive to get high throughput, tricky to manage with dev ops (zookeeper) and seems overkill as I don't need durability and it's only communication between 2 machines. So I'm hoping for a simple solution.

zeromq amazon-web-services lan messaging websocket
1 Answers

It sounds like you are explaining precicely what EC2 cluster placement groups provide: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-ec2-placementgroup.html Edit: You should be able to create the placement group with 2 machines to cover your limited budget. Using larger instances, according to your budget, will also support higher network throughput.

Point 4 looks like it would be supported by SQS FIFO though, despite the fact that SQS FIFO queues only support up to 3,000 messages per second with batching.

A managed streaming solution like Kinesis Data Streams would definitely cover your use case, at scale, much better than a raw web socket. Using Kinesis Client Libraries, you can write your consumer to read from the stream.

AWS also has a Managed Kafka service to rule out the overhead and management of necessary components like Apache ZK: https://aws.amazon.com/msk/

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