Reducing connection overhead for branch office scenarios

Because Choria allows you to manage nodes spread all around the world, and because you might be working from your laptop, far away from the (bad) Wi-Fi access points that connects you through (bad) PLC to the (bad) internet connection from the (not bad) island you are on, you may experience inconvenient latency and unreliabilities.

The reason is quite simple: while the Choria servers maintain a permanent connection with the message broker, the Choria client has to establish a new connection with the middleware for each request. Latency and packet loss do not help with establishing TLS encrypted connections in a timely fashion.

But good news everyone! NATS — the messaging system Choria is built on — has built-in support for so-called leaf nodes which offer a solution to this problem.

[Read More]