Tars is a distributed systems platform that provides a high-performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework, service discovery, and a centralized administration platform for building and managing microservice-based applications. At its core, it offers a custom binary protocol for efficient serialization and communication between services, along with a name service that dynamically resolves service endpoints for RPC routing.
The platform distinguishes itself by supporting multi-language microservice development, enabling services to be written in C++, Java, Node.js, PHP, and Go using a shared RPC framework and consistent protocol. It includes a flexible scheduling engine that assigns service instances to hosts based on configurable policies, and a web-based administration platform for real-time service monitoring, configuration, and lifecycle management. The framework also generates client and server stubs from interface definitions across all supported languages, and hosts stateless application logic in lightweight containers that can be started, stopped, or migrated.
Additional capabilities include centralized service administration for monitoring and configuring distributed deployments, as well as tools for tracking service statistics and maintaining operational reliability. The project bundles a complete set of components for service registration, peer discovery, and workload scheduling across distributed systems.