When integrating two independent services you have two options: making a remote procedure call (RPC), or sending a message. Which should you choose? What is a Remote Procedure Call? An organization often needs to share data and processes between multiple independent processes in a responsive way. For example, updating a user’s name in a shipping system may trigger updates in a billing system. The shipping system could update the billing system’s data directly by modifying a shared database, but this approach requires the shipping system to know far too much about the internal processes of the billing system. Instead, the business system can encapsulate the update operation behind an interface in the form of a remote procedure call, or RPC. ...

A big portion of any software engineering revolves around integrating multiple, disparate applications into a cohesive and functional whole. These apps may be built in house or third-party, or they may run on your network or distributed geographically, or they may be microservices designed to integrate. In any of these cases, you have several different options for integration, each with pros and cons. The integration patterns listed here are ordered by least to most sophisticated, but also by least to most complex. ...

The request was fairly simple — iterate through some data and update some dates. Something as simple as this. for entry in db.query(): entry.date = entry.date + timedelta(days=10) entry.put() Unfortunately, the NoSQL database we were using did not support schemas and, unbeknownst to me, some data had been changed in unexpected ways on production. Something as simple as this. Notice the Outlier? My code seemed correct. Unit tests passed. Code review passed. It ran flawlessly on the test environment. QA signed off on the change. So we deployed it. And things broke. ...

Point-to-point communication between servers usually works just fine when one or two instances are communicating. One or two instances communicating However, if you increase the number of applications, the total number of connections increases. Three instances communicating In fact, the total number of connections increases as a square of the number of application instances. So, if you are running 100 instances, you will be maintaining O(100^2) connections. The scaling becomes quite painful. ...

After reading the Thrift whitepaper and sending your first message, you may still have some questions about how Thrift actually works. This article helps answer those questions by providing a guided tour through the Apache Thrift architecture, highlighting the protocols, transports, and compiler, and how they interact with each other. Thrift from 10,000 feet At a high-level, Thrift is organized into several layers as in Figure 1. The layers highlighted in yellow represent application code that is written by a user. The portions in red represent code generated by the Thrift compiler from an interface definition defined in an IDL file. The layers in orange are portions of Thrift available as library code imported into your application as a dependency. Lastly, the device layer in blue represents the physical device transmitting messages. ...

I recently finished reading the excellent book “Release It!” by Michael Nygard. One of the key points that I wanted to remember was the stability anti-patterns. So, this post will serve as a reminder of architectural smells to look out for when designing production systems. This list of anti-patterns are common forces that will create or accelerate failures in production systems. Given the nature of distributed systems, avoiding these patterns is not possible. You must accept that they will happen, and program your application to be resilient to these failures. ...

Metrics-Driven Development is an emerging term developing from the practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery, dev ops, and agile software methodologies. This article serves to define what metrics-driven development is, why it is useful, and how to use it to drive software changes. Let’s start with a definition of metrics-driven development. Metrics-Driven Development (MDD) The use of real-time metrics to drive rapid, precise, and granular software iterations. This definition is simple and straightforward, but does leave room for interpretation. Let’s dive deeper and break the definition down, bit-by-bit. ...

Testing concurrent objects can be challenging. One particular pattern that is useful for objects used in producer-consumer designs is to ensure that everything put in to a shared concurrent queue by a producer is correctly executed by consumers. ...

Title and Author of Paper Generalized Isolation Level Definitions, Adya et al. Summary The ANSI SQL standard defines isolation levels allowing database users to trade off between performance and consistency when running transactions. Unfortunately, the wording in the SQL standard is geared towards locking as the sole supported concurrency method. This paper presents alternative definitions to the isolation levels specified in the ANSI SQL standard that are general enough to allow for any concurrency method (multi-version, optimistic, etc.) to be used. ...

So you want to use Thrift? You’ve come here because you want to use Apache Thrift and you don’t know where to start. Good. You’re in the right spot. Throughout this document we will develop a simple service that communicates using Thrift. This will introduce you to the workflow for generating client and server code using Thrift and how to Thrift works to separate your application’s business logic from it’s transport methods. ...