TARS and TSeer Form Open Source Project Communities Under The Linux Foundation to Expand Adoption and Pace of Development

Initially developed and used by Tencent for the past 10 years, remote procedure call framework TARS and name service discovery and scheduling framework TSeer are now available freely under open source licenses

SAN FRANCISCO and BEIJING (LinuxCon China), June 25, 2018 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced at LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen China in Beijing that TARS, a remote procedure call (RPC) framework, and TSeer, a high availability service discovery, registration and fault tolerance framework, have become Linux Foundation projects. Both projects were initially developed by leading Chinese technology company, Tencent, which open sourced the projects last year. This follows the announcement of Tencent becoming a Platinum member of The Linux Foundation, and reflects the foundation’s growing collaboration with the Chinese open source community.

TARS is a high performance RPC framework developed by Tencent as a full-fledged enterprise solution for microservice maintenance, development and operation, making architectures more powerful. The project enables users to execute procedures remotely. It supports multiple languages including C++, Java, Node.js, PHP and Python. A rapid build system and automatic code generation are provided for agile development.

TSeer, a lightweight version of the TARS name service, is a high availability service discovery, registration and fault tolerance framework, currently used in Tencent products including QQ Browser, Tencent App Store, Tencent Mobile Manager, China Literature and others, handling an average of 10 billion requests per day.

“We want to thank Tencent for opening up TARS and TSeer to the open source community so many organizations can benefit from this innovative technology,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “By bringing these projects into The Linux Foundation, the project communities will benefit from transparent governance as well as support in marketing, training, legal issues and other areas. We are excited to collaborate with this growing community in the days ahead.”

Zeng Yu, the Vice President of Tencent, said: “It is our great honor to have TARS and TSeer become a part of The Linux Foundation. Tencent has over ten years of experience providing service and interacting with a massive number of users, which has allowed TARS and TSeer to fully optimize load balancing and fault-tolerant systems. Therefore, we believe the two projects will be important contributions to the open source community. We are confident that more global developers will join TARS and TSeer thanks to the support of The Linux Foundation.”

TARS features high availability via service discovery, smart dispatcher, disaster recovery, fault tolerance and flexible fuse. Its complete, multidimensional monitoring facilities, combined with a visualized management platform, leverage efficient operations. Compared to other open source microservice frameworks, TARS promotes its competitiveness by multi-language support, protocol extensibility, convenience in development/operation and monitoring.

TSeer supports a variety of load balancing algorithms to provide a reliable fault tolerance strategy. For rapid development of services, TSeer provides three different routing strategies including the nearest access strategy, set grouping strategy and full scheduling strategy. The service scheduling of TSeer is highly intelligent and optimized, which effectively solve the challenges like cross machine room call and promote the service availability and call quality.

Tencent has been using TARS and TSeer internally to support a wide range of core business operations for ten years. The company initially open sourced TARS in April 2017, and community involvement has grown since then. In the past eight month, there have been three new releases including multiple new features, language support and protocols.

In addition to Tencent, other founding project members who are supporting and contributing to TARS and TSeer include China Literature, Huya, Ifly Tech and UpChina. Numerous companies across fields such as financial services, education, healthcare and government have already deployed these projects in production.

Organizations interested in becoming a member and developers who would like to learn more about TARS or contribute code to the project can view the GitHub repository at https://github.com/Tencent/Tars, and TSeer at https://github.com/Tencent/TSeer.

Supporting Quotes

1. Han Tianfeng, founder of SWOOLE open source program:

“With the integration of the TARS and PHP SWOOLE projects, many companies will be able to take advantage of the ability to solve services management problems directly. And thanks to the welcoming atmosphere of the open source community, anyone will now be able to contribute to the TARS project and benefit from it in a reciprocal manner.”

2. Ling Jun, senior system architect of iFLY TEK:

“Taking TARS as a foundation, we combine its service management framework with our own platform and share an improved ProtoBuf protocol solution for the open source community. To us, TARS’s strength of enhancing systems’ stability and operation performance is obvious.”

3. Fu Xujun, the Vice president of China Literature Limited:

“TARS helps us fix issues including service discovery, intelligent scheduling, load balancing, mistake and disaster tolerance, multi-dimensional monitoring and visualized operation management. Thanks to TARS, our R&D efficiency has improved measurably, operational cost dropped greatly and the whole service system gained excellent, stable performance.”

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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