A fast Node.js microservices engine for running cloud functions with low latency. Admin dashboard included.
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The Boltz Engine is a fast and clustered Node.js microservices engine, starting instances from a cold start in 100ms, and subsequent interactions with functions fall under 10ms under normal conditions. V8 VM instances are used to seperate contexts and allow you to architect your code as self-hosted microservices interoperable with cloud based services. Multithreading means your instances are scaled across the the entire cluster over all your CPU cores. An admin api allows you to manage Boltz from the included admin interface.
Boltz let's you create VM instances to recieve and process web requests, and volumes to store code, configurations, and let you save data to a virtual disk temporarily. All changes are cleared when the instance or volume needs to be reloaded.
Packages are loaded from the package.json and installed in sandboxed folders on the host filesystem, they are shared with any instances using the same volume on the same process.
Recommended use of the Boltz Engine is for simple microservices projects that can later be scaled with a proper cloud product. It has a low overhead and learning curve, allowing you to focus on functionality of your project and not setting it up to run on a cloud platform when it is light enough to handle locally. It's also super fast, giving results on your local machine in under 10ms, instead of thounsands of milliseconds on normal cloud functions. Plus it's easy to use with the included admin interface.
The Boltz engine has a few problems, including:
- Large package install size because of the implementation of indivdual volume node_modules sandboxes.
- The admin API uses basic auth, which means you have to restart the server to change the password.
Using a GCP Cloud Shell Instance, a function was tasked of repeating the name query parameter with an exclamation mark, and it performed as follows:
- Using a single worker process:
4500-5000requests per second at a latency of50ms. - Using four worker processes:
5500-6000requests per second at a latency of4-8ms.
Using the same function with 1 worker we can achieve 1000 simultaneous connections doing 200,000 requests with a latency of about 100ms and 5600rps.
Boltz is accepting pull requests to improve the engine or the web interface, located in the web repo here. It uses typescript with the Google eslint ruleset, so try to remain consistent, and keep it performant.
When you are ready to distribute your changes, you need to make sure to have the web files under the public directory, otherwise, just run the web interface in development mode alongside the engine.
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