I like the approach of microservices. Easily(or easier) to deploy, to manage, to develop and so on than a monolith. The microservices pattern says one database instance per microservice, in the most cases that isn't a matter but in some cases it is. I explain my problem with an example.
I have a web service where the users can upload e.g. an image and other users can comment and rate it and there's a view counter. Now I would implement 4 services.
Upload Image Service
the user uploads its image to the website
the image has some meta information like description, title, tags, upload date
Comment Service
if an user adds a comment to the image then this service handles the request and creates an entry in the database with the attributes content, videoId, userId and date
View Counter Service
always if an user views/clicks that image a new request to service will be created and an new entry in the DB with the user id and video id is stored
Each service has its own database and all services are completely independent to each other. The communication between services is only via REST API. The DB is ElasticSearch.
And here comes the problem. I will create a fourth service the "Image Search Service". It's a really common task like the search function in youtube.
For the best search results I need each of the attributes/information from the preceding 3 services. The search is depending on, of course, the tags, description and the upload date but the likes/dislike have an influence and views and comments too. An image with a high view count will be ranked higher, for example.
But when I store all this information in separate DBs then I can not consider it in one query, but I think this necessary by a full text search.
Has someone may be some experiences or some ideas to solve this problem or is there may be a best practice? I rode something about event sourcing but that's not the right solution for this special problem.
Of course I can create three requests to each service and then create an algorithm and merge the results by myself, but I think elasticsearch is the right man for this job.
JHipster uses elasticsearch on top of a mysql DB. Maybe this could be a solution.
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.
I have a monolith (a big one) and I need text search capabilities.
Is it correct from architectural point of view
to create a new microservice that only returns a text search query result?
I mean say I have a user that want to search something but instead of the monolith doing the work it only accept the user input and calls the microservice that doing the text search work
It depends on that how you design your database. according to your monolith it seems that you have one database. if you create a service for just text searching, i think it's not a good idea. the first thing in microservice is that per service has its own database and the services should not depend each other.
and for text searching the best database is NoSql.
if you can separate your database that can be happened. but if you want to separate database you should think for syncing data of them,(for your text searching) which this has its own patterns and of course its problems. I think so if you have time(and if you really need microservices), refactoring your monolith service to microservice, if you don't, the monolith is not that so bad 😄
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...
Let's say we want to create the app with microservices.
We have some page where we display some items (products).
These products have multiple joins(categories, tags, users, and so on).
If users, categories data are within another services, how can we manage and filter the results?
For example in SQL you create 3,4 joins and get.
With microservices - I have to filter the categories, then filter tags and then products - this could be 10 time slower than the speed of the SQL query.
Also if I have table "products_categories" which set categories for each product which service is responsible for that? Product service or Category service ?
Thank you
In Microservices architecture there are two ways to deal with it.
The API composition pattern— This is the simplest approach and should be used whenever possible. It works by making clients of the services that own the data responsible for invoking the services and combining the results.
The Command query responsibility segregation (CQRS) pattern— This is more powerful than the API composition pattern, but it’s also more complex. It maintains one or more view databases whose sole purpose is to support queries.
I will prefer to use CQRS, Define a view database, which is a read-only replica to support specifically that query. The rest of the services keeps the replica up to date by subscribing to (create, update, insert)events published by the data owner services.
This is a very standard problem whenever any micro-service is built.. People just always feel micro-service is the solution for everything which is not true.
Solution to this problem is designing better. Designing so that there is a balance between performance and redundancy of data. Higher performance ( lower latency numbers ) means more duplicacy of data across different databases of microservice. You should not target to achieve performance as good as SQL Joins ; but also do not duplicate data too much. A balance is needed..
Most importantly, dividing the requirement into right set of micro-services is needed.
I assume you created a "microservice" per database table. Those are not microservices, those are just HTTP-based CRUD interfaces to your database.
First, know why you need microservices. (Is there an actual reason?) Second, you have to create microservices that encompass at least one full (business) functionality for your software. Meaning it doesn't need other services to do it.
If you need a table that needs data from multiple microservices, you by definition made wrong microservices. If a microservice can't provide it's own UI without the help of other services, it doesn't fully contain it's own functionality.
What's stopping you from having multiple services for reading / writing to the same database / table? For example:
One service to write to categories
One service to write to tags
One service to write to products
You could then write another service to read from all three of these services, however, this might not be at a HTTP level, instead you could read from the same database within your read service and leverage the power of SQL.
The service that reads could encompass your join logic which would mean you wouldn't need to consume the other services around it.
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.