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61 lines
2.5 KiB
ReStructuredText
61 lines
2.5 KiB
ReStructuredText
.. _implementation_toc:
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Implementation Overview
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=======================
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.. WARNING::
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Incomplete / under construction
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The following design aspects may convince you that `zrepl` is superior to a hacked-together shell script solution.
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Testability & Performance
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-------------------------
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zrepl is written in Go, a real programming language with type safety,
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reasonable performance, testing infrastructure and an (opinionated) idea of
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software engineering.
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* key parts & algorithms of zrepl are covered by unit tests (work in progress)
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* zrepl is noticably faster than comparable shell scripts
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RPC protocol
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------------
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While it is tempting to just issue a few `ssh remote 'zfs send ...' | zfs recv`, this has a number of drawbacks:
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* The snapshot streams need to be compatible.
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* Communication is still unidirectional. Thus, you will most likely
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* either not take advantage of features such as *compressed send & recv*
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* or issue additional `ssh` commands in advance to figure out what features are supported on the other side.
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* Advanced logic in shell scripts is ugly to read, poorly testable and a pain to maintain.
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zrepl takes a different approach:
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* Define an RPC protocol.
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* Establish an encrypted, authenticated, bidirectional communication channel...
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* ... with zrepl running at both ends of it.
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This has several obvious benefits:
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* No blank root shell access is given to the other side.
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* Instead, an *authenticated* peer can *request* filesystem lists, snapshot streams, etc.
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* Requests are then checked against job-specific ACLs, limiting a client to the filesystems it is actually allowed to replicate.
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* The {{< zrepl-transport "transport mechanism" >}} is decoupled from the remaining logic, keeping it extensible.
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Protocol Implementation
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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zrepl implements its own RPC protocol.
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This is mostly due to the fact that existing solutions do not provide efficient means to transport large amounts of data.
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Package [`github.com/zrepl/zrepl/rpc`](https://github.com/zrepl/zrepl/tree/master/rpc) builds a special-case handling around returning an `io.Reader` as part of a unary RPC call.
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Measurements show only a single memory-to-memory copy of a snapshot stream is made using `github.com/zrepl/zrepl/rpc`, and there is still potential for further optimizations.
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Logging & Transparency
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----------------------
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zrepl comes with [rich, structured and configurable logging]({{< relref "configuration/logging.md" >}}), allowing administators to understand what the software is actually doing.
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