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Hashicorp Go-Plugin

Hashicorp go-plugin is a Go Plugin system over RPC. The plugin system is only designed to work over a local reliable network. For more information about the go-plugin architecture and features visit https://github.com/hashicorp/go-plugin#readme

Usage

To use the plugin system, following steps should be followed (These are high level steps):

  1. Choose the interface you want to expose for the plugins. (Manager in our case, defined in pkg/shared/interface.go)
  2. For each interface, implement an implementation of that interface that communicates over a net/rpc connection. Both, the client and server implementation are required for the communication to take place. (defined in pkg/shared/rpc.go)
  3. Create a Plugin implementation that knows how to create the RPC client/server for a given plugin type. Plugin is an inbuilt type defined by hashicorp/go-plugins.
  4. Plugin authors i.e the plugin code calls plugin.Serve to serve the plugin.
  5. Plugin users i.e the core program use plugin.Client to launch a subprocess and request an interface implementation over RPC

Pros

  1. Plugins use RPC/gRPC to communicate with the host process, hence plugins can't crash the host process. A panic in a plugin doesn't panic the plugin user.
  2. Plugins are a Go interface implementation: hence writing and consuming plugins feel very "natural"!
  3. Used in production by many hashicorp projects: Vault, Terraform etc
  4. Can be unloaded (killing the client) and hence, hot reloading can easily be implemented.

More features here

Cons

  1. Performance overhead is HUGE! (Refer the benchmarks below)
  2. Lack of documentations

Benchmarks

This section contains the benchmark of each of the methods of the Manager interface that are called using the hashicorp go-plugin framework.

Method Name Operations ns/op
OnLoad() 7863 145501 ns/op
GetUser() 14107 85400 ns/op
GetUserByClaim() 14268 84915 ns/op
GetUserGroups() 15367 79499 ns/op
FindUser() 264476 6429 ns/op 
$ ./run.sh
goos: linux
goarch: amd64
pkg: github.com/jimil749/reva-plugin-benchmark
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50GHz
BenchmarkHashicorpPluginRPC/OnLoad-4         	    7863	    145501 ns/op
BenchmarkHashicorpPluginRPC/GetUser-4        	   14107	     85400 ns/op
BenchmarkHashicorpPluginRPC/GetUserByClaim-4 	   14268	     84915 ns/op
BenchmarkHashicorpPluginRPC/GetUserGroups-4  	   15367	     79499 ns/op
BenchmarkHashicorpPluginRPC/FindUser-4       	  264476	      6429 ns/op
PASS
ok  	github.com/jimil749/reva-plugin-benchmark	9.066s