RSocket

RSocket is an application protocol initially developed by Netflix,¹ that supports Reactive Streams. The motivation behind its development was to replace HTTP, which is inefficient for many tasks such as microservices communication, with a protocol that has less overhead.²

RSocket is a binary protocol for use on byte stream transports such as TCP and WebSocket. It enables the following symmetric interaction models via async message passing over a single connection:

• request/response (stream of 1)
• request/stream (finite stream of many)
• fire-and-forget (no response)
• channel (bidirectional streams)

It supports session resumption, to allow resuming long-lived streams across different transport connections. This is particularly useful for mobile‹–›server communication when network connections drop, switch, and reconnect frequently.