A Lightweight Hybrid Publish/Subscribe Event Fabric for IPC and Modular Distributed Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces CNS, a lightweight hybrid publish/subscribe event fabric designed for efficient IPC and distributed messaging in modular systems, combining local and distributed contexts with minimal overhead.

Contribution

CNS provides a novel hybrid event fabric that simplifies structured IPC and distributed messaging with a unified routing vocabulary and minimal performance overhead.

Findings

Local delivery averages 30 μs.

Distributed delivery averages 1.26-1.37 ms.

Hybrid bridge delivery averages 1.64-1.89 ms.

Abstract

Modular software deployed on mini compute units in controlled distributed environments often needs two messaging paths: low-overhead in-process coordination and selective cross-node distribution. In practice, event identity, serialization, and transport bridging are frequently implemented as ad hoc glue, which complicates inter-process communication (IPC), structured routing, and shutdown behavior. This paper presents CNS, a lightweight local-first hybrid event fabric centered on asynchronous fire-and-forget messaging. CNS combines a typed event key, per-family serialization and validation, a local publish/subscribe context for in-process coordination, and a NATS-backed distributed context for inter-node distribution. A bridge runtime moves events between the two contexts while preserving a common routing vocabulary. The primary operating model is fire-and-forget publication and subscription; bidirectional request-reply remains available as a secondary extension on the same subject space. A Python prototype and single-machine measurements are reported. Local-only delivery averaged about 30 $\mu$s. Distributed-only delivery averaged 1.26-1.37 ms, and the hybrid bridge averaged 1.64-1.89 ms. Validation introduced modest overhead relative to serialization choice. The resulting artifact is suited to structured IPC and practical message movement within modular services and across bounded sets of controlled nodes.