Event Carried State Transfer
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In his white paper "Data on the Outside vs. Data on the Inside", Pat Helland classifies data according to whether it exists inside a service boundary or outside that boundary. He calls the former Inside Data and the latter Outside Data.
Inside Data is the data inside the service boundary. No one outside the service boundary can take a dependency on Inside Data. The service is the single writer of this data, the system of record, and is at liberty to change its schema. The backing store for a service holds Inside Data.
Outside Data is what the service communicates to consumers at its boundary. It has three interesting properties:
1: It is immutable. Changing this data does not impact the Inside Data of the originating service. That data; can only change from outside by using a provided API, if any, at the boundary.
2: It is stale. As soon as data leaves our service it risks being stale. Any update to the data in the originating service will not be reflected in that data. Consider that if we use an HTTP API and GET the state of a resource, a PUT that arrives to change that resource immediately after will mean the copy that we have is now stale.
3: It should be versioned. Because the data risks being stale, we need to version it, so that we can compare it against potentially fresher versions. For example in HTTP we can use the If-None-Match header with an ETag to determine if our data is stale, or if the resource would be the same if we retrieved it again.
(It's worth noting that data supplied by a client as part of a command or request sent to the service is also Outside Data.)
Pat Helland uses the term Reference Data to describe the types of data suitable for sharing as outside data.
1. Shared Collections. This is ubiquitous data that everyone needs to use to do work, such as a list of users, products, suppliers, brokers etc. It is so common for code to need to join this data that it makes sense to copy it to each service that needs it.
2. Operand Data. Constructing requests to other microservices may require a service to understand a set of available options such as customer billing plans, or product categories. Operand data is where we share the range of available options we can use to construct requests.
3. Snapshots. Where we want to query across multiple microservices we can end up with chatty solutions making requests to other microservices which we then need to join in the caller. An alternative is to listen to events so as to build an model that we can query. This is the model used by many Big Data pipelines or by Composite View Models.
Outside Data is amenable to caching. Indeed this is how the web scales, we expose Outside Data from the Origin Server that is immutable (changing the response body has no impact on Inside Data), stale (post our GET a subsequent POST may modify the Inside Data our response was built from, perhaps before we have even parsed the result, and versioned (use of a Last Modified or ETag header allows the Origin Server to version the result that it responds with).
It's not just HTTP APIs whose results can be cached, we could also cache an event from the origin server, raised via AMQP, Kafka, ATOM or some other protocol.
If the origin server raises events whenever a change occurs to the resources it manages, then consuming services downstream can cache those results, thus preventing the need to make a request to the origin server to GET the current state of the entity. We can think of this as a push based cache instead of a pull based one.
The name given to building a cache upstream of the origin server from events is Event Carried State Transfer or ECST.
There are some valuable aspects to this kind of cache.
When we need to combine the state from two or more microservices to answer a query or respond to a command, we want to avoid making requests to that other service. This is because we temporally couple the two services together - for our service to work, the other services must also be available.
To solve this problem, we could work with a cache of the data we need to enrich our service built by ECST. By listening to the microservice we need the data from, we are able to join to the cache of data we require without making a request to that service.
Usually a worker process listens for events from the other service and populates our local cache from the other microservice's events.
Note that what we are putting in the cache is Outside Data, not Inside Data. We do not want to couple our consuming microservice to the the internals of the producing microservices model. We want to store the equivalent to what we would recieve if we queried for it. This is why we prefer ECST over simple replication of data between services which would couple us to the details.
We could also meet the constraint that our service needs data from another to respond by ensuring that the request has all the data we require to process the event. If we think of the sender as the data source, and our service as the data sink, we can build a pipeline where the original request is enriched with the required data by the microservices that own that data as a filter step.
Where no central process controls this pipeline we refer to it as choreography.
And we refer to it as orchestration when a process controls the pipeline. Orchestration uses commands, whereas choreography uses events. For this reason we may prefer choreography, as it has lower behavioural coupling, unless we need confirmed rollback, or use of the reservation pattern which are easier with a Process Manager controlling the workflow.
Whilst this could also work for a query, it is less common to take this approach to populating a response due to the likely latency of the response.
Imagine that we are writing software for a hotel. We have identified a number of microservices for our hotel:
DirectBooking: Lets a customer reserve a room. May be a customer with an account or a guest. Credit Card Payments: Handles taking payments from a customer. Accounts: Holds information on account holders, including card details Housekeeping: Prepares rooms for a guest's stay and provides upkeep of the room during the stay Channel Manager: Markets our hotel rooms via various aggregator sites.
When an account holder books a room they use the DirectBooking API to POST a booking. DirectBooking validates the booking and then raises an event to indicate that there has been a BookingMadeOnAccount. A number of services listen for this message:
Channel Manager: Decrements the rooms available on aggregator sites. Housekeeping: Schedules occupancy, cleaning of the room prior to occupancy, during and after. Credit Card Payments: Takes a payment from the Account holder.
How does the Credit Card Payments system take the payment, when Accounts holds the account holders credit card details? We don't want to call a credit card details HTTP directly as this moves us back to a request driven architecture.
We have two options.
Accounts listens for DirectBookingMadeOnAccount. It adds the credit card details to the booking and raises a DirectBookingMadeOnAccountWithCardDetails message. It is this message that Credit Card Payments listens to and then takes the card payment via.
Accounts publishes an event whenever an account holder changes name, address, or credit card details, called AccountDetailsChanged. Credit Card Payments subscribes to this event and caches the data in its own backing store. Then when a payment request comes in via BookingMadeOnAccount it is able to look up the credit card details and take the payment. When we cross-check we can see that account details would seem to be a clear case of Shared Collection Reference Data and suitable for use in ECST.
Our preference for the two may depend on the extent to which we want to allow Credit Card Payments to take a payment even if Accounts is down, as Credit Card Payments is working with a cache. we may decide that a bulkhead is valuable enough to us to use ECST over choreography via a pipeline.
See Correctness in Brighter for guidance on how to use Brighter's support for the Outbox pattern to ensure producer-consumer correctness.
