What Is Hermes Transport?

Hermes Transport is a messaging system that is used for asynchronous communication between microservices. It is a lightweight and flexible transport that allows services to communicate with each other without being dependent on the availability of other services.

What is Asynchronous Communication?

Asynchronous communication refers to a pattern of communication where the sender does not wait for the recipient to receive and process the message before continuing execution. This type of communication is often used in distributed systems where services may be located on different machines or may have varying response times.

How Does Hermes Transport Work?

Hermes Transport uses a publish-subscribe model for message delivery. Services can publish messages to topics, and other services can subscribe to those topics to receive messages. This decouples the sender from the receiver, allowing both services to operate independently.

When a service publishes a message, it sends it to the Hermes broker. The broker then delivers the message to all subscribed services. If there are no subscribers, the message is discarded.

Advantages of Using Hermes Transport

  • Scalability: Hermes transport allows for horizontal scaling by enabling multiple instances of a service to consume messages from a topic.
  • Fault Tolerance: If a service goes down, its messages are stored in durable storage until it comes back online.
  • Flexibility: Hermes transport supports various messaging patterns such as request-response and fire-and-forget.

Conclusion

Hermes Transport provides an efficient and reliable way for microservices to communicate with each other asynchronously. Its lightweight nature and support for various messaging patterns make it an ideal choice for modern distributed systems. By decoupling services from each other, Hermes makes it easier for developers to build scalable and fault-tolerant systems.