Akamai recently announced Flow-IPC, an open source project designed to simplify and accelerate inter-process communication (IPC) in C++. In this video, Yuri Goldfeld, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Akamai and lead developer for Flow-IPC, talks about the challenges of inter-process communication (IPC) and how they led to the creation of Flow-IPC. He says, “Out-of-the-box IPC solutions were either too slow or too difficult to use, prompting the development of Flow-IPC.”

Akamai’s evolution from security CDN to cloud-native compute, with a focus on open source contributions and Flow-IPC project

• Akamai is the world’s biggest content delivery network having been founded in 1998. However since then, the company’s biggest area of growth has been cloud-native compute which led to the company’s acquisition of Linode.
• The company recently announced open source project Flow-IPC, a middleware in C++ for everyday C++ programmers, that aims to make IPC easy and fast.

IPC and its challenges in software development

• Goldfeld explains inter-process communication (IPC) and its challenges. He explains how Flow-IPC was created to solve the problem of slow and difficult IPC in C++ by eliminating copy.
• Goldfeld discusses how he was originally tasked with splitting up a big application using IPC and how out-of-the-box solutions were inadequate. He explains how this led to Flow-IPC and the decision to open source it due to the positive reception.
• He talks about the target audience and how any developer or architect working on the server side, in systems development, will find Flow-IPC helpful.

Flow-IPC’s advantages over existing solutions and integration with other libraries

• Goldfeld shares his experience of his first open source project, announcing it publically on Goldfeld’s website and news outlets, generating interest and constructive discussions that have come out of it already.
• Flow-IPC is also integrated with Cap’n Proto, an open-source serialization library, and Goldfeld talks about collaborating with its creator Kenton Varda.
• Goldfeld highlights Flow-IPC’s competition citing Google IPC which offers simplicity and uses protocol buffers, which people are familiar with. However, it can lead to sluggish loading times and system latency.
• Goldfeld explains how Flow-IPC can be used with Google IPC to remove the copying from that layer, solving the problem of shared memory allocation.

Guest: Yuri Goldfeld (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.