Building More Resilient Applications

Karim Alibhai

github.com/karimsa | npm install karimsa

I will drastically oversimplify some things!

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HQ

Observers / Managers

Assignees

Highly async

pipeline

Sub-par handling due to how fast the features were built

800

10

1

* 5 events per assignee = 40 000 events

HQ

Observers / Managers

Assignees

Worked beautifully

Still sub-par

800

800

1

* 5 events per assignee = 3 200 000 events

(80x)

How we think of failures

Problem: Evil butterflies are rare. Stupid butterflies are common.

How do we aim for high availability?

Availability = 

Time to Failure

Time to Failure + Time to Recovery

* "Patterns for fault tolerant cloud software" by Robert Hanmer

The CAP Theorem

  • Consistency

  • Availability

  • Partition tolerance

*

* Required for distributed systems.

HTTP blah

blah

Server

Client

Unavoidable network partition

  • Consistency

  • Availability

  • Partition tolerance

*

* Required for distributed systems.

CP System

  • Prefers consistency over availability (where possible).
  • CAP defines consistency in terms of reads.
  • In reality, we design in terms of writes.
  • For example:
    • Database transactions
    • REST APIs (?)

AP System

  • Prefers availability over consistency (where possible).
  • Key phrase: is eventually consistent.
  • For example:
    • A `POST` / `PUT` during database downtime is still successful.
    • The `User` microservice is down, so the recommender system provides general recommendations.
    • Your `ES` cluster is down, so your API uses mongodb / cache.

Considerations

  • When mechanics are involved
  • When the user is orchestrating

Use AP where possible, otherwise fallback to CP.

Building More Resilient Applications (Part 1)

By Karim Alibhai

Building More Resilient Applications (Part 1)

A story about when all hell breaks loose & lessons learned from it.

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