Chapter 14. The Hot Rod Interface

Hot Rod is a binary TCP client-server protocol used in Red Hat JBoss Data Grid. It was created to overcome deficiencies in other client/server protocols, such as Memcached.

Hot Rod will failover on a server cluster that undergoes a topology change. Hot Rod achieves this by providing regular updates to clients about the cluster topology.

Hot Rod enables clients to do smart routing of requests in partitioned or distributed JBoss Data Grid server clusters. To do this, Hot Rod allows clients to determine the partition that houses a key and then communicate directly with the server that has the key. This functionality relies on Hot Rod updating the cluster topology with clients, and that the clients use the same consistent hash algorithm as the servers.

JBoss Data Grid contains a server module that implements the Hot Rod protocol. The Hot Rod protocol facilitates faster client and server interactions in comparison to other text-based protocols and allows clients to make decisions about load balancing, failover and data location operations.