allrre

Allrre (pronounced ALL‑ree) is an open‑source, asynchronous communication protocol designed for distributed systems. It standardises lightweight message passing over HTTP/2 and WebSocket connections, providing a minimalistic interface for request–response and push notifications while ensuring backward compatibility with legacy JSON‑RPC.

Allrre was first published in 2021 by the Distributed Computing Lab at the University of Luzern. The design was motivated by the need for a simpler alternative to RESTful services in micro‑service architectures. Early adopters were small cloud‑native projects, and the protocol reached community consensus after the release of version 0.9 in March 2021.

The core of Allrre consists of a binary framing layer termed “ARB” (Allrre Binary), a message encoder/decoder, and a routing table that supports hierarchical namespaces. The protocol defines nine message types, including connect, disconnect, publish, subscribe, and ping. It also incorporates optional security extensions such as OAuth 2.0 bearer tokens and TLS session resumption.

Several open‑source libraries in Go, Rust, and Python have been released to support Allrre. A notable production deployment is the Beacon analytics platform, which uses Allrre to stream real‑time metrics to millions of clients with sub‑millisecond latency. Organisations such as the European Space Agency and the Apache Foundation have adopted prototypes for internal monitoring.

While Allrre is still maturing, its lightweight design and strong community backing have positioned it as a contender for next‑generation service‑mesh protocols. Current research focuses on formal verification of the ARB layer and integration with container orchestration tools.