MassTransit having business logic / behavior in sagas - masstransit

The event handlers for sagas seem to have business logic / behavior embedded in them.
I'm referring to the Starbucks example.
Is this done intentionally due the "sample app" nature of the example?
Doesn't the domain logic / behavior seem very tightly bound to mass transit?

Dru from MT got back to me in the google group (paraphrase): The sample was written to be very simple, separate the business logic and call it in the saga.

Related

what is the difference between event driven and domain driven design Microservices?

What is event driven design and Domain driven design?
What are the specific benefits using of Domain driven design, event driven design in MicroServices.
Event sourcing as an implementation strategy for the persistence of state, e.g. of aggregates. This strategy should not be exposed beyond the boundaries of aggregates. The events from event sourcing should therefore only be used internally in the corresponding aggregate or in the context of CQRS to build related read models.
Domain events, on the other hand, represent a specific fact or happening that is relevant regardless of the type of persistence strategy for aggregates, for example, for integrating bounded contexts.
Event sourcing and domain events can of course be used both at the same time, but should not influence each other. The two concepts are used for different purposes and should therefore not be mixed.
Please, read from the link below to learn more: check here

Saga Choreography implementation problems

I am designing and developing a microservice platform based on the specifications of http://microservices.io/
The entire framework integrates through socket thus removing the overhead of multiple HTTP requests (like most REST APIs).
A service registry host receives the registry of multiple microservice hosts, each microservice is responsible for a domain of the business. Another host we call a router (or API gateway) is responsible for exposing the microservices for consumption by third parties.
We will use the structure of Sagas (in choreography style) to distribute the requisitions, so we have some doubts:
Should a microservice issue the event in any process manager or should it be passed directly to the next microservice responsible for the chain of events? (the same logic applies to rollback)
Who should know how to build the Saga chain of events? The first microservice that receives a certain work or the router?
If an event needs to pass a very large volume of data to the next Saga event, how is this done in terms of the request structure? Is it divided into multiple Sagas for example (as a result pagination type)?
I think the main point is that in this router and microservice structure, who is responsible for building the Sagas and propagating their events.
The article Patterns for Microservices — Sync vs. Async does a great job defining many of the terms used here and has animated gifs demonstrating sync vs. async and orchestrated vs. choreographed as well as hybrid setups.
I know the OP answered his own question for his use case, but I want to try and address the questions raised a bit more generally in lieu of the linked article.
Should a microservice issue the event in any process manager or should it be passed directly to the next microservice responsible for the chain of events?
To use a more general term, a process manager is an orchestrator. A concrete implementation of this may involve a stateful actor that orchestrates a workflow, keeping track of the progress in some way. Since a saga is workflow itself (composed of both forward and compensating actions), it would be the job of the process manager to keep track of the state the saga until completion (success or failure). This typically involves the actor sending synchronous* calls to services waiting for some result before going to the next step. Parallel operations can of course be introduced and what not, but the point is that this actor dictates the progression of the saga.
This is fundamentally different from the choreography model. With this model there is no central actor keeping track of the state of a saga, but rather the saga progresses implicitly via the events that each step emits. Arguably, this is a more pure case of an event-driven model since there is no coordination.
That said, the challenge with this model is observing the state at any given point in time. With the orchestration model above, in theory, each actor could be queried for the state of the saga. In this choreographed model, we don't have this luxury, so in practice a correlation ID is added to every message corresponding to (in this case) a saga. If the messages are queryable in some way (the event bus supports it or through some other storage means), then the messages corresponding to a saga could be queried and the saga state could be reconstructed.. (effectively an event sourced modeled).
Who should know how to build the Saga chain of events? The first microservice that receives a certain work or the router?
This is an interesting question by itself and one that I have been thinking about quite a lot. The easiest and default answer would be.. hard code the saga plans and map them to the incoming message types. E.g. message A triggers plan X, message B triggers plan Y, etc.
However, I have been thinking about what a control plane might look like that manages these plans and provides the mechanism for pushing changes dynamically to message handlers and/or orchestrators dynamically. The two specific use cases in mind are changes in authorization policies or dynamically adding new steps to a plan.
If an event needs to pass a very large volume of data to the next Saga event, how is this done in terms of the request structure? Is it divided into multiple Sagas for example (as a result pagination type)?
The way I have approached this is to include references to the large data if these are objects such as a file or something. For data that are inherently streams themselves, a parallel channel could be referenced that a consumer could read from once it receives the message. I think the important distinction here is to decouple thinking about the messages driving the workflow from where the data is physically materialized which depends on the data representation.
For microservices, every microservice should be responsible for its domain business.
Should a microservice issue the event in any process manager or should it be passed directly to the next microservice responsible for the chain of events? (the same logic applies to rollback)
All events are not passed to the next microservice, but are published, then all microservices interested in the events should subscribe to them.
If there is rollback, you should consider orchestration.
Who should know how to build the Saga chain of events? The first microservice that receives a certain work or the router?
The microservice who publish the event will certainly know how to build it. There are no chain of events, because every microservice interested in the event will subscribe it separately.
If an event needs to pass a very large volume of data to the next Saga event, how is this done in terms of the request structure? Is it divided into multiple Sagas for example (as a result pagination type)?
Only publish the data others may be interested, not all. In most cases, the data are not large, and message queue can handle them efficiently

Listening on multiple events

How to deal with correlated events in an Event Driven Architecture? Concretely, what if multiple events must be triggered in order for some action to be performed. For example, I have a microservice that listens to two events foo and bar and only performs an action when both of the events arrive and have the same correlation id.
One way would be to keep an internal data structure inside the microservice that does the book keeping and when everything is satisfied an appropriate action is triggered. However, the problem with this approach is that the microservice is not immutable anymore.
Is there a better approach?
A classic example is where an order comes in at sales and an event is published. Both Finance and Shipping are subscribed to the event, but shipping is also subscribed to the event coming from finance.
The funny thing is that you have no idea on the order in which the messages arrive. The event from sales might cause a technical error, because the database is offline. It might get queued again or end up in an error queue for operations to retry it. In the meantime the event from finance might arrive. So theoretically
the event from sales should arrive first and then the finance event, but in practice it can be the other way around.
There are a number of solutions here, but I've never liked the graphical ones. As a .NET developer I've used K2 and Windows Workflow Foundation in the past, but the solutions most flexible are created in code, not via a graphical interface.
I currently would use NServiceBus or MassTransit for this. On a sidenote, I currently work at Particular Software and we make NServiceBus. NServiceBus has Sagas for this kind of work (documentation) and you can also read on my weblog about a presentation, incl. code on GitHub.
The term saga is kind of loaded, but it basically handles long running (business) processes. Gregor Hohpe calls it a Process Manager (link).
To summarize what sagas do : they are instantiated by incoming messages and have state. Incoming messages are bound/dispatched to a specific saga instance based on a correlationid, for example a customer id or order id. Once the message (event) is processed, state is stored until a new message arrives, or until the code marks the saga as completed and the state is removed from storage.
As said, in the .NET world MassTransit and NServiceBus support this, but there are most likely alternatives in other environments.
If i understand correctly, it looks like you need a CEP ( complex event processor), like ws02 cep or other , which does exactly that.
cep's can aggregate events and perform actions when certain conditions
have been met.

Event-driven architecture and structure of events

I'm new to EDA and I've read a lot about benefits and would probably be interested to apply it during my next project but still haven't understood something.
When raising an event, which pattern is the most suited:
Name the event "CustomerUpdate" and include all information (updated or not) about the customer
Name the event "CustomerUpdate" and include only information that have really been updated
Name the event "CustomerUpdate" and include minimum information (Identifier) and/or a URI to let the consumer retrieves information about this Customer.
I ask the question because some of our events could be heavy and frequent.
Thx for your answers and time.
Name the event "CustomerUpdate"
First let's start with your event name. The purpose of an event is to describe something which has already happenned. This is different from a command, which is to issue an instruction for something yet to happen.
Your event name "CustomerUpdate" sounds ambiguous in this respect, as it could be describing something in the past or something in the future.
CustomerUpdated would be better, but even then, Updated is another ambiguous term, and is nonspecific in a business context. Why was the customer updated in this instance? Was it because they changed their payment details? Moved home? Were they upgraded from silver to gold status? Events can be made as specific as needed.
This may seem at first to be overthinking, but event naming becomes especially relevant as you remove data and context from the event payload, moving more toward skinny events (the "option 3" from your question, which I discuss below).
That is not to suggest that it is always appropriate to define events at this level of granularity, only that it is an avenue which is open to you early on in the project which may pay dividends later on (or may swamp you with thousands of event types).
Going back to your actual question, let's take each of your options in turn:
Name the event "CustomerUpdate" and include all information (updated
or not) about the customer
Let's call this "pattern" the Fat message.
Fat messages (also called snapshots) represent the state of the described entity at a given point in time with all the event context present in the payload. They are interesting because the message itself represents the contract between service and consumer. They can be used for communicating changes of state between business domains, where it may be preferred that all event context be present during message processing by the consumer.
Advantages:
Self consistent - can be consumed entirely without knowledge of other systems.
Simple to consume (upsert).
Disadvantages:
Brittle - the contract between service and consumer is coupled to the message itself.
Easy to overwrite current data with old data if messages arrive in the wrong order (hint: you can mitigate this by using the event sourcing pattern)
Large.
Name the event "CustomerUpdate" and include only information that have
really been updated
Let's call this pattern the Delta message.
Deltas are similar to fat messages in many ways, though they are generally more complex to generate and consume. A good example here is the JSONPatch standard.
Because they are only a partial description of the event entity, deltas also come with a built-in assumption that the consumer knows something about the event being described. For this reason they may be less suitable for sending outside a business domain, where the event entity may not be well known.
Deltas really shine when synchronising data between systems sharing the same entity model, ideally persisted in non-relational storage (eg, no-sql). In this instance an entity can be retrieved, the delta applied, and then persisted again with minimal effort.
Advantages:
Smaller than Fat messages
Excels in use cases involving shared entity models
Portable (if based on a standard such as jsonpatch, or to a lesser extent, diffgram)
Disadvantages:
Similar to the Fat message, assumes complete knowledge of the data entity.
Easy to overwrite current data with old data.
Complex to generate and consume (except for specific use cases)
Name the event "CustomerUpdate" and include minimum information
(Identifier) and/or a URI to let the consumer retrieves information
about this Customer.
Let's call this the Skinny message.
Skinny messages are different from the other message patterns you have defined, in that the service/consumer contract is no longer explicit in the message, but implied in that at some later time the consumer will retrieve the event context. This decouples the contract and the message exchange, which is a good thing.
This may or may not lend itself well to cross-business domain communication of events, depending on how your enterprise is set up. Because the event payload is so small (usually an ID with some headers), there is no context other than the name of the event on which the consumer can base processing decisions; therefore it becomes more important to make sure the event is named appropriately, especially if there are multiple ways a consumer could handle a CustomerUpdated message.
Additionally it may not be good practice to include an actual resource address in the event data - because events are things which have already happened, event messages are generally immutable and therefore any information in the event should be true forever in case the events need to be replayed. In this instance a resource address could easily become obsolete and events would not be re-playable.
Advantages:
Decouples service contract from message.
Information about the event contained in the event name.
Naturally idempotent (with time-stamp).
Generally tiny.
Simple to generate and consume.
Disadvantages:
Consumer must make additional call to retrieve event context - requires explicit knowledge of other systems.
Event context may have become obsolete at the point where the consumer retrieves it, making this approach generally unsuitable for some real-time applications.
When raising an event, which pattern is the most suited?
I think the answer to this is: it depends on lots of things, and there is probably no one right answer.
Update from comments: Also worth reading, a very old, classic, blog post on messaging: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/nickmalik/killing-the-command-message-should-we-use-events-or-documents (also here: http://vanguardea.com/killing-the-command-message-should-we-use-events-or-documents/)
Martin Fowler gave a great talk about "The Many Meanings of Event-Driven Architecture" (the content is based on this paper) in which he mentioned the Event-Carried State Transfer pattern.
It seems to be close to your second option "Delta message" with the difference that it doesn't try to describe an entity, but instead describe a named business fact that happened and carry over all the necessary data to understand this fact.
I don't think it matters how you have modeled your persistence layer when it comes to designing domain events. Likewise, I don't think it matters how your consumer has modeled its own persistence layer when designing domain events.
Thus, I don't think it's wise to put as an advantage the fact that you can apply the event as a patch directly on your data (from a consumer point of view), because it pushes the producer to design their events given the persistence model of a consumer.
In that case, I would tend to think that you're designing persistence patches, instead of domain events.
What do you think?

in MVC/MVP/MVPC where do you put your business logic?

in the MVC/MVP/MVPC design pattern where do you put your business logic? No, I do not mean the ASP.NET MVC Framework (aka "Tag Soup").
Some people say you should put it in the "Controller" in MVC/MVPC or "Presenter". But, others think it should be part of the Model.
What do you think and why?
This is how I see it:
The controller is for application logic; logic which is specific to how your application wants to interact with the domain of knowledge it pertains to.
The model is for logic that is independent of the application. i.e. logic that is valid in all possible applications of the domain of knowledge it pertains to.
Hence nearly all business rules will be in the model.
I find a useful question to ask myself when I need to decide where to put some logic is "is this always true, or just for the part of the application I am currently coding?"
The way I have my ASP.NET MVC application structure the workflow looks like this:
Controller -> Services -> Repositories
The Services layer above is where all the business logic takes place. If you put your business logic in your Controller layer, you lose the ability to re-use that business logic in other controllers.
I don't believe it belongs in the controller, because once it's embedded there it can't get out.
I think MVC should have another layer injected in-between: a service layer that maps to use cases. It contains business logic, knows about units of work and transactions, and deals with model and persistence objects to accomplish its tasks.
The controller has a reference to the service that it needs to fulfill its use case. It worries about unmarshalling requests into objects the service can deal with, calls the service, and marshals the response to send back to the view.
With this arrangement, the service is usable on its own even without the controller/view pair. It can be a local or remote object, packaged and deployed any way you wish, that the controller deals with.
The controller now becomes bound more closely to the view. After all, the controller you'll use for a desktop is likely to be different than the one for a web app.
I think this design is more service-oriented.
Put your business logic in domain and keep your domain separte. I prefered Presenter -> Command (Message command use NServiceBus) -> Domain (with BC Bounded Context) -> EventStore -> Event handler -> Repository (read model). If logic is not fit in domain then use service layer.
Please read article from Martin fowler, Eric Evan, Greg Young and Udi dahan. They have define very clear picture.
Here is article written by Mark Nijhof : http://elegantcode.com/2009/11/11/cqrs-la-greg-young/
By all means, put it in the model!
Of course some of the user interaction will have to be in the view, that will be related to your app and business logic, but avoid this as much as possible. Ironically following the principle of doing as little as possible as the user is 'working' in your GUI and as much during 'submit' or action requests makes for a better user experience and usability, not the other way around. At least for line-of-business apps.
You can put it in two places. The Controller and in the Presentation layer. By having some of the logic in the Presentation layer, you can limit the number of requests back into the architecture which adds load to the system. Yeah, you have to code twice, but sometimes this is what you need for a responsive user experience.
I kinda like what was said here (http://www.martinhunter.co.nz/articles/MVPC.pdf)
"With MVPC, the presenter component of the MVP model is split into two
components: the presenter (view control logic) and controller (abstract purpose control logic)."

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