SYSTEM Cited by 1 source

TChannel

TChannel (github.com/uber/tchannel) is Uber's bi-directional RPC protocol, built in-house during the 2013–14 microservice build-out. Used with Hyperbahn as the service-discovery + routing substrate, TChannel provides "better performance and forwarding for our Node and Python services" and first-class fault tolerance, rate limiting, and circuit breaking baked into the protocol layer. (Source: sources/2024-03-14-highscalability-brief-history-of-scaling-uber)

Service authors wrote interfaces in Apache Thrift for strong typed contracts over TChannel/Hyperbahn. Over time Uber migrated to gRPC + Protobuf as those ecosystems matured.

Seen in

• sources/2024-03-14-highscalability-brief-history-of-scaling-uber — one of the early microservice-platform primitives built to prevent the 2013 SOA transition from becoming a distributed monolith.

Related

• systems/hyperbahn — TChannel's companion service-discovery layer.
• systems/grpc — the successor Uber eventually migrated to.
• systems/apache-thrift — IDL layer on top of TChannel.
• companies/uber — origin org.