WHY / WHEN using rather DDS instead of ZeroMQ? [cl

Question

I read the followings:

1. DDS vs AMQP vs ZeroMQ
2. http://mnb.ociweb.com/mnb/MiddlewareNewsBrief-201004.html

And it seems that there is no benfit using DDS instead of zmq:

1. the latency of zmq is better.
2. It seem to me that the API of ZMQ is cleared and simple.
3. I cant use ZMQ in order to transfer data between threads / processes / stations.

So:

1. When it is better to use DDS ?
2. Are there any better performance of DDS over ZMQ ?
3. Is there a clear purpose of using DDS (and not ZMQ) ?

Thanks

Answer 1

In my (admittedly biased) experience as a DDS implementor/vendor many applications find significant benefits of using DDS over middleware technologies, including ZeroMQ. In fact I see many more "critical applications" using DDS than ZeroMQ...

First a couple of clarifications:

(1) DDS and the RTPS protocol it uses underneath are standards, not specific products. There are many implementations of these standards. To my knowledge there are at least 9 different companies that have independent products and codebases that implement these standards. It does not make sense to talk about the "performance" of DDS vs ZeroMQ, you can only talk about the performance of a specific implementation. I will address the issue of performance later but from that point of view alone your statement "the latency of zmq is better" is plainly wrong. The opposite statement would be just as wrong, of course.

(2) I did not find much objective information in first reference you provided. The main point there was that DDS seemed the best fit for that application and there was a concern about how broadly it was used, which the reply from AC clarified. But the arguments seemed a bit subjective. There was a negative reply to AC's posting based on somebody's subjective examination of the codebase of a specific product. Even assuming the person that posted the negative comments had a valid point, the comments would apply only to one specific DDS implementation/product not to DDS in general. Personally I would not give much credence to that comment, its tone seems too hostile to be based on just the stated facts.

(3) Regarding the clarity/simplicity of API's. Are your comments based on benchmark example you provide in the second reference? This code is not using the standard DDS APIs. I am not sure why OCI (the company that wrote that article) did it like that--perhaps they adapted some other prior code.

A good place to look at API examples that are conformant with the DDS specification are these:

• Modern C++: http://blogs.rti.com/2014/08/01/create-a-p2p-distributed-application-in-under-35-lines-of-c11-code/
• Classic C++: http://www.twinoakscomputing.com/coredx/examples/hello_cpp

In any case as I mention later the layer of abstraction provided by DDS and ZeroMQ is quite different so the APIs are not directly comparable...

In answer to you specific questions.

1. When it is better to use DDS?

It is difficult to provide a short/objective answer to a question as broad as this. I am sure ZeroMQ is a good product and many people are happy. The same can be said about DDS.

I think the best thing to do is point at some of the differences and let people decide what is important to them.

DDS and ZeroMQ are different in terms of the governance, ecosystem, capabilities, and even layer of abstraction.

Some important differences:

1.1 Governance, Standards & Ecosystem

DDS and RTPS are open international standards from the Object Management Group (OMG). ZeroMQ is a "loose structure controlled by its contributors"

This means there is open governance and clear OMG processes that control the specification and its evolution, as well as the IPR rules.

ZeroMQ IPR is less clear IMO. From their web page (http://zeromq.org/docs:features) they state "ZeroMQ's libzmq core is owned by its contributors" and "The ZeroMQ organization is a loose confederation without a clear power structure, that mostly lives on GitHub. The organization wiki page explains how anyone can join the Owners' team simply by bringing in some interesting work."

This "loose structure" may be more problematic to users that care about things like IPR pedigree, Warranty and indemnification, etc.

Related to that. if I understood correctly there is only one core ZeroMQ implementation (the one in github), and only company that stands behind it (iMatix). From there it seems just 4 committers are doing most of the development work in the core (libzmq). If iMatix was to be acquired or decided to change its business model, or the main committers lost interest, the users would few recourse beyond supporting the codebase themselves.

Of course there are many successful projects/technologies based on common ownership of the code. On the other hand having an ecosystem of companies competing with independent products, codebases, and business models provides good assurance to the future of the technology... It all depends how big the communities and ecosystems are and how risk-averse the user is.

1.2 Features & Layer of Abstraction

Both DDS and ZeroMQ support patterns like publish-subscribe and Request-Reply (this is a new addition to DDS, the so-called DDS-RPC). But generally speaking the layer of abstraction of DDS is higher. meaning the middleware does more "automatically" for the application. Specifically.

DDS provides for automatic discovery

In DDS you just publish/subscribe to topic names. You never have to provide IP addresses, computer names, or ports. It is all handled by the builtin discovery. And it does it automatically without additional services. This means that applications can be re-deployed and integrated without recompilation or reconfiguration.

ZeroMQ is lower level. You must specify ports, IP addresses etc.

DDS pub-sub is data-centric.

An application can publish to a Topic, but the associated data can represent updated to multiple data-objects, each identified by key-attributes. For example when publishing airplane positions each update can identify the "airplane ID" and the middleware can provide history, enforce QoS, update rates, etc. for each airplane separately. The middleware understands and communicates when new airplanes appear, or disappear from the system.

Related to the above DDS can keep a cache of relevant data for the application, which it can query (by key or content) as it sees fit, e.g. read the last 5 positions of an airplane. The application is notified of changes but it is not forced to consume them immediately. This also can help reduce the amount of code the application-developer needs to write.

DDS provides more support for "application" QoS

DDS supports over 22 message and data-delivery QoS policies, such as Reliability, Endpoint Liveliness, Message Persistence and delivery to late-joiners, Message expiration, Failover, monitoring of periodic updates, time-based filtering, ordering, etc. This are all configured via simple QoS-policy settings. The application uses the same read/write API and all the extra work is done underneath.

ZeroMQ approaches this problem by providing building blocks and patters. It is quite flexible but the application has to program, assemble and orchestrate the different patterns to get the higher-level behavior. For example to get reliable pub-sub requires combining multiple patterns as described in http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#toc119.

DDS supports additional capabilities like content-filtering, time-filtering, partitions, domains, ...

These are not available in ZeroMQ. They would have to be built at the application layer.

DDS provides a type system and supports type extensibility and mutability

You have to combine ZeroMQ with other packages like google protocol buffers to get similar functionality.

Security

There is a DDS-Security specification that provides fine-grained (Topic-level) security including authentication, encryption, signing, key distribution, secure multicast, etc.

2. Are there any better performance of DDS over ZMQ?

Note that the benchmarks you refer to are for Object Computing Inc's "OpenDDS" implementation. As far as I know this is not known to be one of the fastest DDS implementations. I would recommend you take a look at some of the other ones like RTI Connext DDS (our implementation), PrimsTech's OpenSplice DDS, or TwinOaks' CoreDX DDS. Of course results are highly dependable on the actual test, network, and computers used, but typical latency performances for the faster DDS implementations using C++ are on the order of 50 microseconds, not 180 microseconds). See https://www.rti.com/products/dds/benchmarks.html#CPPLATENCY

Middleware layers like DDS or ZeroMQ run on top of a things like UDP or TCP, so I would expect they are bound by what the underlying network can do and for simple cases they are likely not too different, and they will of course be worse than the raw transport.

Differences also come from what services they provide. So you should compare what you can get for the same level of service, for example publishing reliably to scaling to many consumers, prioritizing information, sending multiple flows and large data over UDP (to avoid TCP's head-of-line blocking), etc.

Based on the OpenDDS study you reference, and the relative performance of different DDS implementations (http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/DDS/) I would expect that in an apples-to-apples test the better-performing implementations of DDS would match or exceed ZeroMQ's.

That said people rarely select the middleware that gives them the "best performance". Otherwise no-one would use Web Services or HTTP. The selection is based on many factors, performance just needs to be as good as required to meet the needs of the application. Robustness, Scalability, Support, Risk, maintainability, fitness of the programming model to the domain, total cost of ownership, etc. are typically more important to the decision.

3. Is there a clear purpose of using DDS (and not ZMQ) ?

Well, yes... in many applications it provides the best tradeoff in terms of performance, scalability, features, application simplicity, robustness, risk-reduction, and total cost of ownership. In the last few years thousands of projects came to that conclusion :)

Gerardo