Tars is an open source project that summarizes years of practical results of the microservice architecture TAF (Total Application Framework) used internally by Tencent. It has been officially open sourced on April 10.
As a high-performance RPC development framework that supports multiple languages and an integrated service governance platform, Tars can help enterprises or users to quickly build stable and reliable distributed applications in the form of micro-services. Its design inspiration comes from the idea of layering, Achieve separation between development and operations. At present, the framework is within Tencent, and has been used in more than 160 businesses (such as mobile browsers, app treasures, mobile housekeepers, mobile QQ, mobile games, etc.) and more than 16,000 servers. Service nodes are deployed and run based on this framework. The scale has reached tens of thousands, and has passed the test of massive users and data volume.
Compared with other similar or familiar application frameworks in the industry, Tars has the following advantages:
First, Tars provides a high-performance (performance up to 40w/s) RPC development framework that supports multiple languages (C++/Java). For example, the open source Dubbo in the industry only supports Java, and the open source Thrift and gRPC in the industry are not as good as Tars;
Second, Tars has an operation management platform for service governance, such as name routing and discovery, deployment/release/expansion/reduction, three-dimensional monitoring, log management, configuration management, etc. Thrift and gRPC are just RPC communication frameworks, and there is still a lot of business development on them;
Third, after years of practice and development in Tencent's different businesses, Tars has better maturity and stability.
The name of Tars comes from the interstellar movie robot Tars. The Tars in the movie has a very friendly interaction method. Anyone who comes into contact with it for the first time can easily communicate with it. Expected efficient completion of all tasks entrusted. With a similar design concept, Tars is also a framework that takes into account ease of use, high performance, and service governance. The purpose is to make development easier, focus on business logic, and make operations more efficient. Everything is under control.
After nearly ten years of exploration, Tars is finally officially open source, which is more suitable for business scenarios with clear message calling clients and servers. The open source address is: https://github.com/Tencent/Tars .
For a detailed technical introduction to Tars, you can pay attention to: