How is CQRS Implemented and where is Read DB getting created - spring-boot

I have discovery service: https://github.com/Naresh-Chaurasia/API-MicroServices-Kafka/tree/master/Microservices-CQRS-SAGA-Kafka/DiscoveryService
I have Product Service: https://github.com/Naresh-Chaurasia/API-MicroServices-Kafka/tree/master/Microservices-CQRS-SAGA-Kafka/ProductsService
I have API gateway: https://github.com/Naresh-Chaurasia/API-MicroServices-Kafka/tree/master/Microservices-CQRS-SAGA-Kafka/ApiGateway
Product Service and API gateway are registered with discovery service. I use API Gateway to access the Product Service.
I am following a course to implement CQRS for products service.
Under ProductService, I have src/main/java/com/appsdeveloperblog/estore/ProductsService/command/ProductAggregate.java
Here the ProductAggregate is Command of CRQS.
It has the following methods (Please refer to GitHub for more details):
#CommandHandler
public ProductAggregate(CreateProductCommand createProductCommand) throws Exception {
...
}
#EventSourcingHandler
public void on(ProductCreatedEvent productCreatedEvent) {
...
}
It also has src/main/java/com/appsdeveloperblog/estore/ProductsService/query/ProductEventsHandler.java, which persist the product in H2 db.
I have also implemented src/main/java/com/appsdeveloperblog/estore/ProductsService/query/ProductsQueryHandler.java, which is used to query the db.
Here the ProductsQueryHandleris Query of CRQS.
My Question is as follows
What i am failing to understand that how and when is the Publish Event generated, and when the message is put in Messaging queue.
Also, is it possible that after the data is persisted to Event Store, it is not stored in Read DB. If yes, then how can we synchronize the Read DB.

What i am failing to understand that how and when is the Publish Event generated, and when the message is put in Messaging queue.
It happens after the events are published into the event store.
There are lots of possible designs that you might use to copy events from the event store to the event handler on the query side. These would include
Having the application code copy the event onto the message queue, which the event handler subscribes to
Having the event handler pull batches of events from the event store on a schedule
Having the event handler pull events from the event store, but using the message queue to announce that there are new messages to pull.
is it possible that after the data is persisted to Event Store, it is not stored in Read DB.
Yes. How common that is will depend on... well, really it mostly depends on how much you invest in reliability.
This is why the pull model tends to be popular - the read process can keep track of which events it has seen, and ask for the next batch of messages after X - where X is a time stamp, or a sequence number, or something.
Warning: if you are trying to roll your own event store, getting these details right can be tricky. Unless the details of the event store are part of your competitive advantage, you really want to buy reliability rather than trying to build it.

Related

Should we store Events in a database? (Event Driven Design)

We have several services that publishes and subscribes to Domain Events. What we usually do is log events whenever we publish and log events whenever we process events. We basically use this to apply choreography pattern.
We are not doing Event Sourcing in these systems, and there's no programmatic use for them after publishing/processing. That's the main driver we opted not to store these in a durable container, like a database or event store.
Question is, are we missing some fundamental thing by doing this?
Is storing Events a must?
I consider queued messages as system messages, even if they represent some domain event in an event-driven architecture (pub/sub messaging).
There is absolutely no hard-and-fast rule about their storage. If you would like to keep them around you could have your messaging mechanism forward them to some auditing endpoint for storage and then remove them after some time (if necessary).
You are not missing anything fundamental by not storing them.
You're definitely not missing out on anything (but there is a catch) especially if that's not a need by the business. An Event-Sourced System would definitely store all the events generated by the system into a database (or any other event-store)
The main use of an event store is to be able to restore the state of the system to the current state in case of a failure by replaying messages. To make this process of recovery faster we have snapshots.
In your case since these events are just are only relevant until the process is completed, it would not make sense to store them until you have a failure. (this is the catch) especially in a Distributed Transaction case scenario.
What I would suggest?
Don't store the event themselves but log the relevant details about these events and maybe use an ELK stack or Grafana to store these logs.
Use either the Saga Pattern or the Routing Slip pattern in case of a Distributed Transaction and log them as well.
In case a failure occurs while processing an event, put that event into an exception queue and handle it. If it's a part of a distributed transaction make sure either they all have the same TransactionId or they have a CorrelationId so you can lookup for logs and save your system.
For reliably performing your business transactions in a distributed archicture you somehow need to make sure that your events are published at least once.
So a service that publishes events needs to persist such an event within the same transaction that causes it to get created.
Considering you are publishing an event via infrastructure services (e.g. a messaging service) you can not rely on it being available all the time.
Also, your own service instance could go down after persisting your newly created or changed aggregate but before it had the chance to publish the event via, for instance, a messaging service.
Question is, are we missing some fundamental thing by doing this? Is storing Events a must?
It doesn't matter that you are not doing event sourcing. Unless it is okay from the business perspective to sometimes lose an event forever you need to temporarily persist your event with your local transaction until it got published.
You can look into the Transactional Outbox Pattern to achieve reliable event publishing.
Note: Logging/tracking your events somehow for monitoring or later analyzing/reporting purpose is a different thing and has another motivation.

Difficulty Understanding Event Sourcing Microservice Event Receiving/Communication

I've been aware of event sourcing, CQRS, DDD and micro services for a little while and I'm now at that point where I want to try and start implementing stuff and giving something a go.
I've been looking into the technical side of CQRS and I understand the DDD concepts in there. How both the write side handles commands from the UI and publishes events from it, and how the read side handles events and creates projections on them.
The difficulty I'm having is the communication & a handling events from service-to-service (both from a write to read service and between micro services).
So I want to focus on eventstore (this one: https://eventstore.com/ to be less ambiguous). This is what I want to use as I understand it is a perfect for event sourcing and the simple nature of storing the events means I can use this for a message bus as well.
So my issue falls into two questions:
Between the write and the read, in order for the read side to receive/fetch the events created from the write side, am i right in thinking something like a catch up subscription can be used to subscribe to a stream to receive any events written to it or do i use something like polling to fetch events from a given point?
Between micro services, I am having an even harder time... So when looking at CQRS tutorials/talks etc... they always seem to talk with an example of an isolated service which receives commands from the UI/API. This is fine. I understand the write side will have an API attached to it so the user can interact with it to perform commands. E.g. create a customer. However... say if I have two micro services, e.g. a order micro service and an shipping micro service, how does the shipping micro service get the events published from the order micro service. Specifically, how does those customer events, translate to commands for the shipping service.
So let's take a simple example of: - Command created from the order's API to place an order. - A OrderPlacedEvent is published to the event store. How does the shipping service listen and react to this is it need to then DispatchOrder and create ain turn an OrderDispatchedEvent.
Does the write side of the shipping microservice then need to poll or also have a catch up subscription to the order stream? If so how does an event get translated to an command using DDD approach?
something like a catch up subscription can be used to subscribe to a stream to receive any events written to it
Yes, using catch-up subscriptions is the right way of doing it. You need to keep the stream position of your subscription persisted somewhere as well.
Here you can find some sample code that works. I am not posting the whole snippet since it is too long.
The projection service startup flow is:
Load the checkpoint (first time ever it would be the stream start)
Subscribe to the stream from that checkpoint
The runtime flow will then be:
The subscription will then call the function you provide when it receives an event. There's some plumbing there to do, like if you subscribe to $all, you need to filter out system events (it will be easier in the next version of Event Store)
Project the event
Store the new checkpoint
If you make your projections idempotent, you can store the checkpoint from time to time and save some IO.
how does the shipping micro service get the events published from the order micro service
When you build a brand new system and you have a small team working on all the components, you can make a shortcut and subscribe to domain events from another service, as you'd do with projections. Within the integration context (between the boxes), ordering should not be important so you can use persistent subscriptions so you won't need to think about checkpoints. Event Store will do it for you.
Be aware that it introduces tight coupling on the domain event schema of the originating service. Your contexts will have the Partnership relationship or the downstream service will be a Conformist.
When you move forward with your system, you might decide to decouple those contexts properly. So, you introduce a stable event API for the service that publishes events for others to consume. The same subscription that you used for integration can now instead take care of translating domain (internal) events to integration (external) events. The consuming context would then use the stable API and the domain model of the upstream service will be free in iterating on their domain model, as soon as they keep the conversion up-to-date.
It won't be necessary to use Event Store for the downstream context, they could just as well use a message broker. Integration events usually don't need to be persisted due to their transient nature.
We are running a webinar series about Event Sourcing at Event Store, check our web site to get on-demand access to previous webinars and you might find interesting to join future ones.
The difficulty I'm having is the communication & a handling events from service-to-service (both from a write to read service and between micro services).
The difficulty is not your fault - the DDD literature is really weak when it comes to discussing the plumbing.
Greg Young discusses some of the issues of subscription in the latter part of his Polygot Data talk.
Eventide Project has documentation that does a decent job of explaining the principles behind how the plumbing fits things together.
Between micro services, I am having an even harder time...
The basic idea: your message store is fundamentally a database; when the host of your microservice wakes up, it queries the message store for messages after some checkpoint, and then feeds them to your domain logic (updating its own local copy of the checkpoint as needed).
So the host pulls a document with events in it from the store, and transforms that document into a stream of handle(Event) commands that ultimately get passed to your domain component.
Put another way, you build a host that polls the database for information, parses the response, and then passes the parsed data to the domain model, and writes its own checkpoints.

How to trigger GraphQL Subscriptions from a backend message queue application

Currently I'm using Socket.io / SignalR to emit an event from my backend message queue system, whenever new data is incoming. That way I can setup an event handler in my React application and update the relay cache from within the event handler.
It does not seem like the most Graphql ish way to do things, so I was playing a bit around with pre-RFC live queries implementations, where you observed data changes in reactive data stores pushed it to the graphql server, and further to the client using websockets... with some rather complex custom code... obviously graphql is not ready for real live queries (not polling)
A few lines further down it says:
When building event-based subscriptions, the problem of determining what should trigger an event is easy, since the event defines that explicitly. It also proved fairly straight-forward to implement atop existing message queue systems.
Which leads me to my question. How can you (in a graphql way) best trigger graphql subscriptions when a new event is incoming to your backend message queue application and you need to reflect this new data in the ui in realtime - let's say each second? I'm not talking about triggering the event in the frontend/client or polling ever x seconds like you usually see when talking about subscriptions.
Not sure it's relevant but I'm using Relay Modern as my preferred graphql client.
Here's some ideas that might work if I get a little help to understand in general how to trigger/call a subscription without a mutation.
Backend worker / message queue "A" receives new incoming event with some device data. It uses either SignalR, or other pubsub (redis/socket.io/?) to notify the graphql server "B" (which subscribes to the event) about a new event has happened. The graphql server then trigger/execute the subscription and the frontend react relay application "C" automatically updates, since it has a relay subscription defined. This would be ideal, right? but how to trigger subscription on the graphql server?
Simply use Socket.io/SignalR to emit events from backend worker / message queue "A" on incoming data, subscribe and handle the event in the frontend "B", and then programically calling the subscription from within the Socket.io/SignalR event handler (if such a thing, directly calling a subscription, is even possible?). But then the only improvement from using subscriptions, instead of pure Socket.io/SignalR will be that I have moved the updating of the relay cache/store from the handler to the subscription. Not a big improvement, if any. But the manual update of the cache/store is really cumbersome, although not that hard :/
How do people handle real streaming live (device) data with signalr, and why is all realtime articles/examples just repeating the same old simple chat application, where the ui just updates after a user makes a click event? Is graphql not suited yet for dealing with a stream of frequently incoming device data in realtime? I understand why live queries was delayed after playing with implementing them myself, but without them, REAL realtime data updates and push it from the server to the frontend?

Microservices architecture event collaboration pattern

Martin Fowler's description of the Event Collaboration pattern (https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventCollaboration.html) appears to imply that requisite external data (data from other services) that is needed for a service to function should be replicated and maintained within the service.
This seems to imply that we should not resort issuing explicit queries.
For example:
Say you have a communications service that is responsible for sending emails to clients and is dependent order information (that lives in the order service) to send an order confirmation email.
With Event Collaboration, the communications service will have some internal representation of all orders that it will have built up by consuming relevant order creation/modification events.
In this example a query to retrieve order details will not be necessary to generate the confirmation email.
Are there any instances in which we would use explicit query messages rather than data replication when adopting the Event Collaboration pattern?
i think even in this case, what i would have done is create a consumer of OrderPlaced event in Order Microservice Only. That event processor will read all the details from order create a MailToBeSent event and write it on a Topic or Queue , which CommunicationService should listen and send the email.
Communication Service should not understand , how to create a email based on order(as core purpose of cummunication service is to send emails).
Design wise also communication service should not require to change every time you add a new service which want a mail sending functionality.

Event Aggregator Error Handling With Rollback

I've been studying a lot of the common ways that developers design/architect an application on domain driven design (Still trying to understand the concept as a whole). Some of the examples that I saw included the use of events via an event aggregator. I liked the concept because it truly keeps the different elements/domains of an application decoupled.
A concern that I have is: how do you rollback an operation in the case of an error?
For example:
Say I have an order application that has to save an order to the database and also save a copy of the order as a pdf to a CMS. The application fires an event that a new order has been created and the pdf service that subscribes to this event saves the pdf. Meanwhile when committing the order changes to the database an exception is thrown. The problem is that the pdf has been saved but their isn't a matching database record.
Should I cache the previously handled events and fire a new error event that looks to the cache for "undo" operations? Use something like the command pattern for this?
Or... is the event aggregator not a good pattern for this.
Edit
I'm starting to think that maybe events should be used for less "mission critical" items, such as emailing and logging.
My initial thought was to limit dependencies by using the event aggregator pattern.
You want the event to be committed in the same transaction as the operation on your database.
In this particular scenario, you can push the event on a queue, which enlists in your transaction, so that the event will never go out unless the aggregate is persisted. This will make creating the PDF eventual consistent; if creating the PDF fails, you can fix the problem, and have it automatically retried.
Maybe you can get more inspiration in one of my previous posts on eventual consistent domain events with RavenDB and IronMQ.
Handling an event before it actually happened (committed) only works if the event handler participates in the transaction. Make the event handler transactional (for instance by storing the PDF in a database), or publish and handle events after the transaction committed.

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