The Aeron Files (the truth is out there)

Aeron is an efficient reliable UDP unicast, UDP multicast, and IPC message transport. Its documentation can be found on the Aeron Wiki (GitHub) and Aeron Docs.

I want to complement those resources with a description of Aeron from the perspective of the files on disk (and shared memory 'files').

Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.

Also, when you're investigating a production issue after a cluster restart, a copy of the files might be all you have. This is exactly the situation I've been in, investigating the cause of some corruption (not caused by Aeron) and understanding not just what data is in each file, but what was responsible for putting it there, would have been incredibly useful. The truth was out there, in the files, but it took a while to find.

This started as some rough notes for myself. Time, curiosity, and fiddling around with silly animations turned those notes into this website. I'm hoping to complement the official documentation, so I've tried to stay away from the 'how to use Aeron' type of information that's already been covered. There are topics that I haven't covered at all, but I hope this is enough of a starting point to make them easier to learn elsewhere.

This website is a work in progress. I have covered Aeron Transport and Aeron Archive so far. Aeron Cluster may arrive Q3 2024.

Finally, who am I anyway? About me.

Let's begin...