Whether accelerating media delivery or empowering developers to build distributed low-latency applications, the path of the bits through our distributed network involves the collaboration of many programs — and, therefore, the sharing of data from program to program. This is where inter-process communication (IPC) plays an ever-present role.

In a few words, IPC means separate programs sharing data structures — from file contents to configuration to algorithmic details — among one another. Such data transmission is not instant. At Akamai, every millisecond of latency added by IPC is scrutinized: It simply needs to be fast. At the same time, our software is complex. Truly minimizing latency usually means developing custom, specialized code — again and again, depending on the context. This is costly and wasteful — as a business, we simply need to do better. We developed Flow-IPC to avoid having to repeatedly trade off between an elegant, reusable API and no-latency performance.

Today, we’re announcing the release of Flow-IPC. The project currently supports Linux, with macOS/ARM64 and Windows planned. Flow-IPC is available under the Apache 2.0 and MIT open-source licenses. We are very excited to give back to the open-source community!