A quick note on distributed named pipes

a bunch of distributed processes communicating via dnpipes

Today I sat down and finally got to write up an idea that was floating around in my head for quite some time: Distributed Named Pipes or dnpipes.

You can check out the dnpipes specification, a simple reference implementation in Go (152 LOC, using Apache Kafka with DC/OS) as well as some use cases discussion on GitHub:

mhausenblas/dnpipes

I’d be interested in your thoughts. Is this a pattern you’ve come across as well? Is this abstraction useful as it is or maybe too simplistic? What other use cases do you see?