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Consistency and Availability in Microservice Architectures

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Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 372))

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Abstract

For the most part, the first instances of microservice architectures have been deployed for the benefit of the so-called Internet-scale companies in contexts where availability is a critical concern. Their success in this context, along with their promise to be more agile than competing solutions in adapting to changing needs, soon attracted the interest of very diverse classes of business domains characterized by different priorities with respect to non-functional requirements. Microservices embraced this challenge, showing a unique ability to allow for a plethora of solutions, enabling developers to reach the trade-off between consistency and availability that better suits their needs. From a design point of view this translates into a vast solution space. While this can be perceived as an opportunity to enjoy greater freedom with respect to other architectural styles it also means that finding the best solution for the problem at hand can be complex and it is easier to incur in errors that can put a whole project at risk. In this paper we review some possible solutions to address common problems that arise when adopting microservices and we present strategies to address consistency and availability; we also discuss the impact these strategies have on the design space.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix.

  2. 2.

    https://twitter.github.io/finagle/.

  3. 3.

    https://kubernetes.io/.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/Netflix/conductor.

  5. 5.

    https://zeebe.io.

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Acknowledgements

The work presented in this paper was partially supported by the MIUR PRIN 2015 GAUSS Project.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Davide Rossi

Authors
  1. Davide Rossi
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Correspondence to Davide Rossi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    María José Escalona

  2. University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    Francisco Domínguez Mayo

  3. University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway

    Tim A. Majchrzak

  4. University of Paris 1, Paris, France

    Valérie Monfort

Appendix

Appendix

Digression 1:

The orchestrator is a microservice, which translates in yet another development project to maintain. Even with the minimal overhead imposed by agile methods the explosion of the number of projects can be troublesome. For this reason (and to improve time-to-market) several approaches based on configurable microservices orchestrators are starting to appear, in some sense we are witnessing the (dreaded) orchestration middleware from E-SOA making its appearance in disguise in the microservices world. Examples include Netflix’s ConductorFootnote 4 (which uses a proprietary DSL) and ZeebeFootnote 5 (which uses BPMN).

Digression 2:

the indirection caused by a messaging infrastructure in often mistaken by logical decoupling. It is true that with these solutions you could, for example, run each component in isolation and that changes in a component providing a function through messaging to another does not imply a change to the latter (which is an usual definition of dependency) but still a malfunction is going to happen so a form of coupling is present. This is because messaging based solution imply a form of hidden interfaces in which a logical dependency still holds between components but interfaces cannot be used as contracts to certify them. This could be summarized in the observation that message-based solutions are more flexible but the price to pay for that is maintenance.

Digression 3:

enhancing existing configurable orchestrators with long-running transaction support seems like a reasonable option. This would essentially result in BPEL for microservices. To the best of the author’s knowledge no product able to do that is currently available (albeit Zeebe seems a good candidate), it will be interesting to see what the future holds in this respect.

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Rossi, D. (2019). Consistency and Availability in Microservice Architectures. In: Escalona, M., Domínguez Mayo, F., Majchrzak, T., Monfort, V. (eds) Web Information Systems and Technologies. WEBIST 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35330-8_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35330-8_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35329-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35330-8

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