Horizontal scaling a microservice that processes a lot of data - microservices

Let’s say I have a microservice that needs to generate millions of reports with even more rows of data.
Business rules:
One client generates 0 to many reports on a single run
Many clients can be generating reports in a single
Any request to generate a report for a client that is currently processing should throw an error
The reports are generated on a schedule.
The schedule is stored in the database of the microservice (a) for each client. The schedule is managed by a separate microservice (b) and the data is replicated via integration events to microservice a.
Ex:
Client A, Schedule = today
Client B, Schedule = 3 days from now
Only client A will have a report generated.
Now, let’s say the microservice gets a request to generate all reports for clients configured to generate today. Since it has to generate millions of reports, we want it to horizontally scale.
However, I’m having a hard time identifying a great way to do this. Some ideas:
Only let one instance of the microservice a retrieve the clients that need to generate today. This can be polled in case that service fails and another can pick it up.
Insert this data into a shared cache
or into a topic or queue
that all other instances will process from. Scale based on the number of
messages in the topic.
Let another microservice (b) make the request for generation and pass in each request into a topic or queue that microservice (a) reads. However this introduces a dependency between services and can cause some data ownership ambiguities

Related

Web APIS and Microservices

Two microservices share the same database because they each contribute part of the database's content, this occasionally causes data overwrites or errors. Which of the following strategies will help to reduce this problem ?*
A) Develop a transaction manager component between the microservices and the database to control access.
B) Rely on standard database locking mechanisms.
C) Use a first write principle to allow the first microservice to write data to determine the record status.
D) Separate the database into two partitions and allow each microservice dedicated access to its own partition.
E) Create a condition in each microservice where one writes during odd seconds and the other writes during even seconds.

Parallel processing of records from database table

I have a relational table that is being populated by an application. There is a column named o_number which can be used to group the records.
I have another application that is basically having a Spring Scheduler. This application is deployed on multiple servers. I want to understand if there is a way where I can make sure that each of the scheduler instances processes a unique group of records in parallel. If a set of records are being processed by one server, it should not be picked up by another one. Also, in order to scale, we would want to increase the number of instances of the scheduler application.
Thanks
Anup
This is a general question, so here's my general 2 cents on the matter.
You create a new layer managing the requesting originating from your application instances to the database. So, probably you will be building a new code/project running on the same server as the database (or some other server). The application instances will be talking to that managing layer instead of the database directly.
The manager will keep track of which records are requested hence fetch records that are yet to be processed upon each new request.

Distributed database design style for microservice-oriented architecture

I am trying to convert one monolithic application into micro service oriented architecture style. Back end I am using spring , spring boot frameworks for development. Front-end I am using angular 2. And also using PostgreSQL as database.
Here my confusion is that, when I am designing my databases as distributed, according to functionalities it may contain 5 databases. Means I am designing according to vertical partition. Then I am thinking to implement inter-microservice communication services to achieve the entire functionality.
The other way I am thinking that to horizontally partition the current structure. So my domain is based on some educational university. So half of university go under one DB and remaining will go under another DB. And deploy services according to Two region (two for two set of university).
Currently I am decided to continue with the last mentioned approach. I am new to these types of tasks, since it referring some architecture task. Also I am beginner to this microservice and distributed database world. Would someone confirm that my approach will give solution to my issue? Can I continue with my second approach - horizontal partitioning of databases according to domain object?
Can I continue with my second approach - Horizontal partitioning of
databases according to domain object?
Temporarily yes, if based on that you are able to scale your current system to meet your needs.
Now lets think about why on the first place you want to move to Microserices as a development style.
Small Components - easier to manager
Independently Deployable - Continous Delivery
Multiple Languages
The code is organized around business capabilities
and .....
When moving to Microservices, you should not have multiple services reading directly from each other databases, which will make them tightly coupled.
One service should be completely ignorant on how the other service designed its internal structure.
Now if you want to move towards microservices and take complete advantage of that, you should have vertical partition as you say and services talk to each other.
Also while moving towards microservices your will get lots and lots of other problems. I tried compiling on how one should start on microservices on this link .
How to separate services which are reading data from same table:
Now lets first create a dummy example: we have three services Order , Shipping , Customer all are three different microservices.
Following are the ways in which multiple services require data from same table:
Service one needs to read data from other service for things like validation.
Order and shipping service might need some data from customer service to complete their operation.
Eg: While placing a order one will call Order Service API with customer id , now as Order Service might need to validate whether its a valid customer or not.
One approach Database level exposure -- not recommened -- use the same customer table -- which binds order service to customer service Impl
Another approach, Call another service to get data
Variation - 1 Call Customer service to check whether customer exists and get some customer data like name , and save this in order service
Variation - 2 do not validate while placing the order, on OrderPlaced event check in async from Customer Service and validate and update state of order if required
I recommend Call another service to get data based on the consistency you want.
In some use cases you want a single transaction between data from multiple services.
For eg: Delete a customer. you might want that all order of the customer also should get deleted.
In this case you need to deal with eventual consistency, service one will raise an event and then service 2 will react accordingly.
Now if this answers your question than ok, else specify in what kind of scenario multiple service require to call another service.
If still not solved, you could email me on puneetjindal.11#gmail.com, will answer you
Currently I am decided to continue with the last mentioned approach.
If you want horizontal scalability (scaling for increasingly large number of client connections) for your database you may be better of with a technology that was designed to work as a scalable, distributed system. Something like CockroachDB or NoSQL. Cockroachdb for example has built in data sharding and replication and allows you to grow with adding server nodes as required.
when I am designing my databases as distributed, according to functionalities it may contain 5 databases
This sounds like you had the right general idea - split by domain functionality. Here's a link to a previous answer regarding general DB design with micro services.
In the Microservices world, each Microservice owns a set of functionalities and the data manipulated by these functionalities. If a microservice needs data owned by another microservice, it cannot directly go to the database maintained/owned by the other microservice rather it would call an API exposed by the other microservice.
Now, regarding the placement of data, there are various options - you can store data owned by a microservice in a NoSQL database like MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra (it really depends on the microservice's use-case) OR you can have a different table for each micro-service in a single instance of a SQL database. BUT remember, if you choose a single instance of a SQL Database with multiple tables, then there would be no joins (basically no interaction) between tables owned by different microservices.
I would suggest you start small and then think about database scaling issues when the usage of the system grows.

microservice messaging db-assigned identifiers

The company I work for is investigating moving from our current monolithic API to microservices. Our current API is heavily dependent on spring and we use SQL server for most persistence. Our microservice investigation is leaning toward spring-cloud, spring-cloud-stream, kafka, and polyglot persistence (isolated database per microservice).
I have a question about how messaging via kafka is typically done in a microservice architecture. We're planning to have a coordination layer between the set of microservices and our client applications, which will coordinate activities across different microservices and isolate clients from changes to microservice APIs. Most of the stuff we've read about using spring-cloud-stream and kafka indicate that we should use streams at the coordination layer (source) for resource change operations (inserts, updates, deletes), with the microservice being one consumer of the messages.
Where I've been having trouble with this is inserts. We make heavy use of database-assigned identifiers (identity columns/auto-increment columns/sequences/surrogate keys), and they're usually assigned as part of a post request and returned to the caller. The coordination layer may be saving multiple things using different microservices and often needs the assigned identifier from one insert before it can move on to the next operation. Using messaging between the coordination layer and microservices for inserts makes it so the coordination layer can't get a response from the insert operation, so it can't get the assigned identifier that it needs. Additionally, other consumers on the stream (i.e. consumers that publish the data to a data warehouse) really need the message to contain the assigned identifier.
How are people dealing with this problem? Are database-assigned identifiers an anti-pattern in microservices? Should we expose separate microservice endpoints that return database-assigned identifiers so that the coordination layer can make a synchronous call to get an identifier before calling the asynchronous insert? We could use UUIDs but our DBAs hate those as primary keys, and they couldn't be used as an order number or other user-facing generated ids.
If you can programmatically create the identifier earlier while receiving from the message source, you can embed the identifier as part of the message header and subsequently use the message header information during database inserts and in any other consumers.
But this approach requires a separate verification by the other consumers against the database to process only the committed transactions (if you are concerned about processing only the inserts).
At our company, we built a dedicated service responsible for unique ids generation. And every other services grap the ids they need from there.
These generated ids couldn't be used as an order number but I think it's shouldn't be used for this job anyway. If you need to sort by created date, it's better to have a created_date field.
One more thing that is used to bug my mind with this approach is that the primary resource might be persisted after the other resource that rerefence it by the id. For example, a insert user, and insert user address request payload are sent asynchronously. The insert user payload contains a generated unique id, and user address payload contains that id as foreign reference back to user. The insert user address might be proccessed before the insert user request, but it's totally fine. I think it's called eventual consistency.

spring batch: process large file

I have 10 large files in production, and we need to read each line from the file and convert comma separated values into some value object and send it to JMS queue and also insert into 3 different table in the database
if we take 10 files we will have 33 million lines. We are using spring batch(MultiResourceItemReader) to read the earch line and have write to write it o db and also send it to JMS. it roughly takes 25 hrs to completed all.
Eventhough we have 10 system in production, presently we use only one system to run this job( i am new to spring batch, and not aware how spring supports in load balancing)
Since we have only one system we configured data source to connect to db and max connection is specified as 25.
To improve the performance we thought to use spring multi thread support. started to use 5 threads. we could see the performance improvement and could see everything completed in 10 hours.
Here i Have below questions:
1) if i process using 5 threads, we will publish huge amount of data into JMS queue. Will queue support huge data.Note we have 10 systems in production to read JMS Message from the queue.
2) Using thread(5) and 1 production system is good approach (or) instead of spring batch insert the data into db i can create a rest service and spring batch calls the rest api to insert the data into db and let spring api inserts data into JmS queue(again, if spring batch process file annd use rest to insert data into db, per second i will read 4 or 5 lines and will call the rest api. Note we have 10 production system). If use rest API approach will my system support(rest can handle huge request using load balancer, and also JMS can handle huge and huge message) or using thread in spring batch app using 1 production system is better approach.
Different JMS providers are going to have different limits, but in general messaging can easily handle millions of rows in a small period of time.
Messaging is going to be faster than inserting directly into the database because a message has very little data to manage (other than JMS properties) instead of the overhead of a complete RDBMS or NoSQL database or whatever, messaging out performs them all.
Assuming the individual lines can be processed in any order, then sending all data to the same queue and have n consumers working the back-end is a sound solution.
Your big bottleneck, however, is getting the data into the database. If the destination table(s) have m/any keys/indices on them, there is going to be serious contention because each insert/update/delete needs to rebuild the indices, so even though you have n different consumers trying to update the database, they're going to trounce on each other as the transactions are completed.
One solution I've seen is disabling all database constrains before you start and enabling at the end, and hopefully if things worked the data is consistent and usable; of course, the risk is there was bad data that you didn't catch and now you need to clean up or reattempt the load
A better solution might be to transform the files into a single file that can be batch loaded into the database using a platform-specific tool. These tools often disable indexes, contraint checking, and anything else that's going to slow things down - often times bypassing SQL itself - to get performance.

Resources