In an event-based microservice architecture what is best practice for querying for additional data needed for a microservice handling an event?
Imagine this microservice constellation:
OrderService - receives orders via REST, writes the order to the order database and issues an OrderCreatedEvent, which includes the order data and a customerId.
CustomerService - REST Api for managing customers by using its own customer database, creates an receives different events which are not relevant for the use case
VoucherService - listens to OrderCreatedEvents to sent vouchers to customers.
Here's the qestion: the VoucherService needs more information on the customer (e.g. the address) as is provided in the OrderCreatedEvent - what's the best way to provide the VoucherService with the customer data?
Possible Solutions:
The VoucherService could call the API of the CustomerService, but this violates the lose coupling of services.
The VoucherService could query the customer database, but this would lead to even tighter coupling as changes to the customer database now must be compatible to the VoucherService.
The OrderService could eventually be able to fill the necessary customer data to the event, but this only works if the data is available for some reason and additionally this will lead to problems because in an enterprise environment there could be 50+ fields for a customer and the OrderService doesn't know (and shouldn't know) which of them are necessary for its clients.
Any suggestions how to solve this?
The solution that you stated:
The OrderService could eventually be able to fill the necessary customer data to the event, but this only works if the data is available for some reason and additionally this will lead to problems because in an enterprise environment there could be 50+ fields for a customer and the OrderService doesn't know (and shouldn't know) which of them are necessary for its clients.
I would suggest to keep the OrderService dumb on customer data, but
since you need the customer data in the VoucherService, you
VoucherService should be interested on the events coming from
CustomerService and store the necessary data that are crucial for the service functionality
There are no silver bullets on solving everything perfectly, but keeping stuff async it will be always the best solution, this requires data duplication and more work, but in the end every service is decoupled and will work without problems on their own
Related
so im learning about microservices and common patterns and i cant seem to find how to address this one issue.
Lets say that my customer needs a module managing customers, and a module managing purchase orders.
I believe that when dealing with microservices its pretty natural to split these two functionalities into separate services - each having its own data.
CustomerService
PurchaseOrderService
Also, he wants to have a table of purchase orders displaying the data of both customers and purchase orders, ie .: Customer name, Order number.
Now, i dont want to use the API Composition pattern because the user must be able to sort over any column he wants which (afaik) is impossible to do without slaughtering the performance using that pattern.
Instead, i choose CQRS pattern
after every purchase order / customer update a message is sent to the message broker
message broker notifies the third service about that message
the third service updates its projection in its own database
So, our third service .:
PurchaseOrderTableService
It stores all the required data in the single database - now we can query it, sort over any column we like while still maintaining a good performance.
And now, the tricky part .:
In the future, client can change his mind and say "Hey, i need the purchase orders table to display additional column - 'Customer country'"
How does one handle that data migration? So far, The PurchaseOrderTableService knows only about two columns - 'Customer name' and 'Order number'.
I imagine that this probably a pretty common problem, so what can i do to avoid reinventing the wheel?
I can of course make CustomerService generate 'CustomerUpdatedMessage' for every existing customer which would force PurchaseOrderTableService to update all its projections, but that seems like a workaround.
If that matters, the stack i thought of is java, spring, kafka, postgresql.
Divide the problem in 2:
Keeping live data in sync: your projection service from now on also needs to persist Customer Country, so all new orders will have the country as expected.
Backfill the older orders: this is a one off operation, so how you implement it really depends on your organization, technologies, etc. For example, you or a DBA can use whatever database tools you have to extract the data from the source database and do a bulk update to the target database. In other cases, you might have to solve it programmatically, for example creating a process in the projection microservice that will query the Customer's microservice API to get the data and update the local copy.
Also note that in most cases, you will already have a process to backfill data, because the need for the projection microservice might arrive months or years after the orders and customers services were created. Other times, the search service is a 3rd party search engine, like Elastic Search instead of a database. In those cases, I would always keep in hand a process to fully reindex the data.
The company that I work at uses a microservices architecture with the 'database per service' pattern. This pattern makes it harder to query based on data from multiple services, since each service has its own database. Imagine a service for managing your products and one for managing stock. You would have to somehow combine the data from both services to query for products based on stock.
I know that event sourcing and API composition are potential solutions to the problem, but I was wondering if it is possible to continuously replicate specific tables from the product and stock databases based on database transaction logs. Wouldn't this be much simpler than say implementing an event based solution like event sourcing? One service that I am working with contains a lot of domain events, which would make implementing and maintaining event-based solution rather complex.
Another reason for why I am considering to look at the problem from a different angle is that there is a lot of data. In-memory joins with say API composition will most likely be slow.
To sum it all up, I would like to know if it is possible to continuously replicate specific tables from different databases into one database.
The technologies that my company uses are primarily Spring Framework and PostgreSQL.
I would step back and ask why you have microservices (including why you have multiple databases). This is because it's quite easy to make choices that are superficially easy but which achieve that ease by negating the reason you had the microservices to begin with, and in such a situation, it may in fact be easier to just not do microservices.
For example, you might be doing microservices because you want to be able to have the team maintaining your product service be able to make changes without coordinating with the stock service or vice versa. By setting up a direct replication of a table from service A's database into service B's database, you essentially require many changes service A might want to make to that table to be coordinated with service B. It's perhaps less operationally coupled than unifying the services into a monolith, but in terms of developer velocity, you're giving up a fair amount.
Alternatively, if the rationale is to allow one service to be down (failures, maintenance, releases: doesn't matter) without taking the others down, a replication which guarantees strong consistency implies that taking service B's database down prevents service A from updating its database (because if you allowed service A to update its database in that situation, you couldn't have strong consistency).
Rather than direct replication, it might make sense to use change data capture (e.g. with Debezium) to publish a stream of changes from the transaction logs (e.g. to Kafka). The critical difference from logical replication is that the consumer can, for instance, choose to ignore updates to columns it doesn't care about: the stock service might include details like where things are stocked in a warehouse, for instance, which is data you don't need for answering a query like "show me the products in this category which are in stock". This can be a nice middle ground between going full event-sourcing and other approaches.
I want to decompose my application to adopt microservices architecture, and i will need to come up with a solid strategy to split my database (Mysql) into multiple small databases (mysql) aligned with my applications.
TL;DR: Depends on the scenario and from what each service will do
Although there is no clear answer to this, since it really depends on your needs and on what each service should do, you can come up with a general starting point (assuming you don't need to keep the existing database type).
Let's assume you have a monolithic application for an e-commerce, and you want to split this application into smaller services, each one with it's own database.
The approach you could use is to create some services that handles some parts of the website: for example you could have one service that handles users authentication,one for the orders, one for the products, one for the invoices and so on...
Now, each service will have it's own database, and here's come another question: which database a specific service should have? Because one of the advantages of this kind of architecture is that each service can have it's own kind of database, so for example the products service can have a non relational database, such as MongoDB, since all it does is getting details about products, so you don't have to manage any relation.
The orders service, on the other hand, could have a relational database, since you want to keep a relation between the order and the invoice for that order. But wait, invoices are handled by the invoice service, so how can you keep the relation between these two without sharing the database? Well, that's one of the "issues" of this approach: you have to keep services independent while also let them communicate each other. How can we do this? There is no clear answer here too... One approach could be to just pass all invoices details to the orders service as well, or you can just pass the invoice ID when saving the order and later retrieve the invoice via an API call to the invoice service, or you can pass all the relevant details you need for the invoice to an API endpoint in the order service that stores these data to a specific table in the database (since most of the times you don't need the entire actual object), etc... The possibilities are endless...
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.
Our new project just started and we have a problem related to its architecture.
We have a 3 layer arhitecture:
WebUI
Business
DataRepositories
Each layer has reference only to the layer below it. The communication is done with what we call entities and business objects (BO) as follows:
DataRepositories <--entities--> Business <--BO--> WebUI
<--X--> means communication using objects of type X.
So we have for example UserEntity as entity and User as BO. Another type is ticket which again has TicketEntity and Ticket.
Currently we have some distinct vertical slices through the layers having something like Accounts for users in DataRepositories, Business and WebUI which are well defined and don't interact with the other slices like Tickets.
Now the problem is that a ticket has an buyer which is an user and we don't know where in our architecture we should connect tickets and users. Should the business components interact between them or the data layer should map the user to the ticket?
To be more specific, we have a method for creating a ticket that is resides in Business and is called from WebUI. It takes as arguments the details of a ticket and "the user" which we don't know yet if it should be an object of type user or just the username/id. If we pass a user object that the presentation should get the user before calling CreateTicket. But, if the webui passes the id then the business layer should resolve the user object which would require adding a reference to the Users business component in Tickets (Business).
Personally, I hate parallel hierarchies like this. You've created what you're calling entities, which should have some behavior associated with them, plus a parallel hierarchy of business objects that should be immutable and without any behavior.
I'd dispense with the business objects. I suspect that they aren't providing any value that you can cite besides immutability and someone else's notion of "architectural purity".
I also don't like the direction of the arrow between entities and repositories. I'd have the repositories know about entities, but not the other way around. Why should an entity know or care if it's persisted? The business logic and behavior should be unchanged.
I'd have the view layer interact with services. These are UI agnostic, but they contain all your business logic to fulfill use cases. If you throw away your UI - and you will every few years - your services will remain in place for as long as the business problem does.
The data layer should be responsible for its own referential integrity. If a ticket needs to JOIN to find its user, then you have to have it in the data layer. When the persistence tier queries for a user, it'll also get the tickets that belong to that user and return the one-to-may relationship in the objects. A User will have a List or Set of Ticket instances. All this should be done in the service layer. The service will orchestrate the persistence, business objects, and other services it needs to fulfill the use case.