[FLINK-4346] Implement basic RPC abstraction

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.5.0
• Component/s: Runtime / Coordination
• Labels: flip-6
• Assignee: Till Rohrmann
• Reporter: Stephan Ewen
• Created: 09/Aug/16 22:45
• Updated: 05/Feb/20 14:33
• Resolved: 13/Jul/18 07:33

Description

As part of refactoring of the cluster management, we can introduce a new RPC abstraction on top of our Akka-based distributed coordination.

It should address the following issues:

• Add type safety to the sender and receiver of messages. We want proper types methods to be called, rather than haveing generic message types and pattern matching everywhere. This is similar to typed actors.

• Make the message receivers testable without involving actors, i.e. the methods should be callable directly. When used with other component, the receiver will be wrapped in an actor that calls the methods based on received messages.

• We want to keep the paradigm of single-threaded execution per "actor"

There is some basic code layout in the following branch and commit:

https://github.com/apache/flink/tree/flip-6/flink-runtime/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/runtime/rpc

Issue Links

• blocks: FLINK-4319 Rework Cluster Management (FLIP-6)
• relates to: FLINK-4399 Add support for oversized messages
• relates to: FLINK-10718 Use IO executor in RpcService for message serialization
• relates to: FLINK-15924 Detect and log blocking main thread operations