Designing State Machines for Streaming Proxies in Rust
A single HTTP exchange can involve partially consumed request bodies, concurrent upstream and downstream progress, mid-stream failures, conditional buffering decisions, and connection reuse that must leave the transport in a well-defined state.
This talk examines how to model a proxied exchange as an explicit state machine whose transitions encode protocol and lifecycle events such as establishing a TCP connection, completing a TLS handshake, and returning a connection to the keepalive pool. The session covers practical Rust designs, including coordinating bidirectional streaming while remaining cancel-safe, buffer management and reuse, and how to keep connections alive for reuse.
The goal is to equip Rust engineers with the mental models and architectural patterns needed to build robust streaming proxies.
