What Is Hermes Message?

Hermes Message is a messaging system that enables communication between microservices in a distributed architecture. It is an open-source project developed by the team at Alibaba Group and is widely used in the tech industry for its speed and reliability.

What Is Microservice Architecture?

Before we dive into Hermes Message, let’s first understand what microservice architecture is. In a traditional monolithic application, all the features and functionalities are tightly coupled together. This makes it difficult to make changes or add new features without impacting the entire application.

Microservice architecture, on the other hand, breaks down an application into smaller, independent services that can be developed and deployed separately. Each service can communicate with others through APIs or messaging systems like Hermes Message.

How Does Hermes Message Work?

Hermes Message uses a publish-subscribe model where messages are sent to topics and subscribers receive messages from those topics. When a microservice wants to send a message, it publishes it to a specific topic. Subscribers who are interested in that topic will receive the message.

To ensure reliability, Hermes Message supports both synchronous and asynchronous messaging. With synchronous messaging, the publisher waits for a response from the subscriber before continuing while with asynchronous messaging, the publisher sends the message without waiting for a response.

Benefits of Using Hermes Message

One of the biggest advantages of using Hermes Message is its speed. It can handle millions of messages per second which makes it ideal for large-scale applications with high traffic.

Another benefit is its reliability. Since messages are sent to topics rather than directly to individual microservices, even if one microservice goes down or experiences issues, messages can still be delivered to other subscribers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Hermes Message is a powerful messaging system that plays an essential role in enabling communication between microservices in distributed architectures. Its speed and reliability make it an excellent choice for large-scale applications with high traffic. By breaking down an application into smaller, independent services and using a messaging system like Hermes Message to connect them, developers can create more flexible and scalable applications.