Bondy Connect

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Features ​

Bondy provides a comprehensive set of features for building scalable, real-time distributed applications through a single, unified platform.

Core Messaging ​

Routed RPC and PubSub ​

  • Unified protocol - Both RPC and PubSub in WAMP
  • Peer-to-peer - Any client can play any role
  • Pattern matching - Exact, prefix, and wildcard URI matching
  • Load balancing - Built-in round-robin, random, first/last policies

Transport Flexibility ​

  • WebSocket - For browsers and modern apps
  • Raw TCP - For backend services
  • Unix Domain Sockets - For local IPC
  • HTTP long-poll and Server-Sent Events - For clients that cannot open a WebSocket; JSON only
  • TLS/SSL - Secure transport encryption

Serialization Options ​

  • JSON - Human-readable, universal
  • MessagePack - Compact binary format
  • CBOR - Concise Binary Object Representation
  • Client chooses per-connection

Distributed System ​

Clustering ​

  • Masterless architecture - No single point of failure
  • Automatic peer discovery - DNS or a static list; Kubernetes uses DNS through a headless Service
  • Full mesh topology - Direct node-to-node connections
  • Horizontal scaling - Add nodes for more capacity

High Availability ​

  • Automatic failover - Clients reconnect to surviving nodes
  • Data replication - State replicated across all nodes
  • Active Anti-Entropy - Proactive inconsistency detection and repair
  • Partition tolerance - Continues operating during network splits

Consistency Model ​

  • Eventually consistent - AP in CAP theorem
  • Conflict-free - CRDT-based state replication
  • Convergent - Anti-entropy that compares Merkle Search Trees
  • Tunable - Application-level consistency where needed

Identity & Access Management ​

Multi-Tenancy ​

  • Realms - Isolated routing and administrative domains
  • Virtual - No infrastructure overhead per realm
  • Dynamic - Create/manage realms via API
  • Unlimited - No predefined limit on realm count

Authentication Methods ​

  • Anonymous - For public access
  • Password - Simple username/password
  • WAMP-CRA - Challenge-Response Authentication
  • Cryptosign - Cryptographic signatures
  • Ticket - Pre-issued authentication tokens
  • OAuth2 - Token-based (via HTTP Gateway)
  • Trust - IP-based trust (localhost)

Authorization ​

  • Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) - Users, groups, permissions
  • URI-based - Granular control per procedure/topic
  • Pattern matching - Exact, prefix, wildcard permissions
  • Source-based - CIDR network restrictions
  • Dynamic - Change permissions without restart

API Gateway ​

HTTP Gateway ​

  • REST API mapping - HTTP → WAMP RPC conversion
  • API specifications - OpenAPI-like configuration
  • OAuth2 support - Token generation and validation
  • CORS - Cross-origin resource sharing
  • Rate limiting - Request throttling

Integration & Interoperability ​

Bridge Relay (Bondy Edge) ​

  • Connect to a remote Bondy router - The edge dials out, so it needs no inbound port
  • Selective sharing - The edge proxies its registrations, and the events of the topics configured with direction: out, to the remote router
  • Security sync - The remote router syncs the bridged realm's security model to the edge
  • Resilient - Automatic reconnection with backoff

See Bondy Edge (Bridge Relay).

Broker Bridge ​

  • Publish to Kafka - Forward WAMP events to Kafka topics; there is no consumer side back into WAMP
  • SMS and email - Send an SMS through AWS SNS, or an email through SMTP, Mailgun or SendGrid
  • Configurable - Per-subscription action templates

See Broker Bridge.

WAMP Client Libraries ​

  • JavaScript/TypeScript
  • Python
  • Java
  • Erlang/Elixir
  • And more via community

Security ​

Transport Security ​

  • TLS/SSL - Encrypted connections
  • Certificate validation - Client and server certs
  • Perfect forward secrecy - Ephemeral key exchange

Application Security ​

  • Session-based - All messages authenticated
  • Fine-grained authorization - Per-URI permissions
  • Security events - Subscribe to security-related events

Network Security ​

  • CIDR-based rules - IP address restrictions
  • Firewall-friendly - Works through HTTP proxies
  • DDoS protection - Rate limiting, connection limits

Observability ​

Monitoring ​

  • Metrics API - Prometheus-compatible metrics
  • Health checks - Liveness and readiness probes
  • Session tracking - Active connections and their state
  • Resource usage - CPU, memory, connections

Logging ​

  • Structured logging - Key-value (key=value) log lines
  • Log levels - Fine-grained control
  • Integration - Works with standard log aggregators

Admin APIs ​

  • WAMP API - Manage via WAMP procedures
  • HTTP API - RESTful management interface
  • Real-time events - Subscribe to system events
  • CLI tools - Command-line administration

Performance ​

Scalability ​

  • Millions of connections - Per node
  • Thousands of messages/sec - Per connection
  • Hundreds of nodes - In a cluster
  • Linear scaling - Performance scales with nodes

Latency ​

  • Sub-millisecond - In-node routing
  • Low overhead - Minimal protocol overhead
  • Persistent connections - No connection setup per message
  • Efficient serialization - Binary formats available

Resource Efficiency ​

  • Erlang VM - Lightweight process model
  • Concurrent - Millions of concurrent processes
  • Memory efficient - Small footprint per connection
  • CPU efficient - Multi-core utilization

Operations ​

Deployment ​

  • Docker - Official Docker images
  • Kubernetes - Runs the Docker image as a StatefulSet; there is no official Helm chart or Operator
  • Release tarball - Runs as a service under a process supervisor such as systemd
  • Cloud-ready - AWS, Azure, GCP compatible

Configuration ​

  • File-based - A key-value bondy.conf, plus JSON files for security configuration and API specifications
  • Environment variables - 12-factor app compatible
  • Dynamic - Runtime configuration changes
  • Defaults - Sensible out-of-box settings

Upgrades ​

  • Full-restart upgrades - Upgrade a cluster by restarting every node on the new release; rolling upgrades are not supported
  • Backward compatible - Clients don't require updates
  • Configuration migration - scripts/migrate_conf.escript checks a bondy.conf and rewrites renamed or removed keys

Developer Experience ​

Documentation ​

  • Comprehensive - Concepts, guides, API reference
  • Examples - Real-world code samples
  • Tutorials - Step-by-step learning paths
  • API docs - Auto-generated from specs

Tooling ​

  • CLI - Command-line tools for common tasks
  • Client libraries - Multiple language support
  • Testing tools - Mock routers, test utilities

Community ​

  • Open source - Apache 2.0 license
  • Active development - Regular releases
  • Support - Community forum and chat
  • Commercial support - Available from vendors

Advanced Features ​

Same Sign-On (SSO) ​

  • Multi-realm auth - One set of credentials for many realms; with a ticket, authenticate once (Single Sign-On)
  • Credential sharing - Centralized user management

Overload Protection ​

  • Load regulation - Bounded router worker pools, and load and memory monitors (load_regulation.*)
  • Rate limiting - Per-source-IP token buckets for handshakes, authentication, connections and HTTP requests, and an opt-in per-session message rate (security.rate_limit.*, off by default)

See Also ​