Sworm

A combination of a global, distributed process registry and supervisor, rolled into one, friendly API.

This library aims to be a drop-in replacement for Swarm, but it is built on top of Horde.

Usage

Sworms can be defined using a macro and then added to your supervision tree. To replicate Swarm, create the following module:

defmodule Swarm do
  use Sworm
end

You are not entirely done yet! Unlike the original Swarm, which has a "singleton" process tree, you will need to add each Sworm to your own application's supervision tree:

    children = [
      Swarm,
      ...
    ]

Now you can call Swarm.registered(), Swarm.register_name etc like you're used to.

Architecture

Sworm combines Horde's DynamicSupervisor and Registry modules to reproduce the Swarm library.

To be able to register an aribtrary {m, f, a} specification with Sworm, it spawns a delegate process and uses this process as the primary process for name registration and supervision. This delegate process then spawns and links the actual process as specified in the MFA.

This way, any MFA can be used with Sworm like it can with Swarm, and does not need to be aware of it, because the delegate process handles name registration, process shutdown on name conflicts, and, in the near future, process handoff.

Node affinity / node black-/whitelisting

Contrarily to Swarm, Sworm does not have a black- or whitelisting mechanism. By design, each Sworm in the cluster only distributes processes among those nodes that explicitly have that particular sworm started in its supervision tree.

Sworm maintains a cluster-global directory CRDT of registered Sworms, keeping track of on which node which type(s) of Sworm run.

This ensures that processes are only started through Sworm on nodes that the sworm itself is also running on, instead of assuming that the cluster is homogenous and processes can run on each node, like Swarm does.

Child restart strategy

By default, the restart strategy in the child specification of the supervision tree is set to :transient. To change this, declare the restart: option in your Sworm module like this:

defmodule MyTemporaryProcesses do
  use Sworm, restart: :temporary
end

Process state handoff

Each individual Sworm can be configured to perform state a handoff to transition the state of the process.

The case here is that when a node shuts down, Sworm will move the processes running on that node onto one of the other nodes of the cluster. By default, these processes are started with a clean sheet, e.g., the state of the process is lost. But when the Sworm is configured to perform process handoffs, the processes in the sworm are given some time to hand off their state into the cluster, so that the state can be restored right after the process is started again on another node.

Process handoff in Sworm works differently from the Swarm library.

Process handoff must be explicitly enabled per sworm:

defmodule MyProcesses do
  use Sworm, handoff: true
end

Or, in config.exs:

config :sworm, MyProcesses, handoff: true

When a handoff occurs, the process that is about to exit, receives the following message:

{MyProcesses, :begin_handoff, delegate, ref}

If it wants to pass on its internal state it needs to send the delegate a corresponding ack:

send(delegate, {ref, :handoff_state, some_state})

Now, on the other node, the new process will be started in the normal way, however, right after it is started it will receive the :end_handoff signal:

 {MyProcesses, :end_handoff, some_state}

It can then restore its state to the state that was sent by its predecessor.

The most basic implementation in a genserver process of this flow is this:

def handle_info({MyProcesses, :begin_handoff, delegate, ref}, state) do
  send(delegate, {ref, :handoff_state, state})
  {:noreply, state}
end

def handle_info({MyProcesses, :end_handoff, state}, _state) do
  {:noreply, state}
end

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed by adding sworm to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:sworm, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Documentation can be generated with ExDoc and published on HexDocs. Once published, the docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/sworm.