Transactions across REST microservices?

Question

Let's say we have a User, Wallet REST microservices and an API gateway that glues things together. When Bob registers on our website, our API gateway needs to create a user through the User microservice and a wallet through the Wallet microservice.

Now here are a few scenarios where things could go wrong:

• User Bob creation fails: that's OK, we just return an error message to the Bob. We're using SQL transactions so no one ever saw Bob in the system. Everything's good :)

• User Bob is created but before our Wallet can be created, our API gateway hard crashes. We now have a User with no wallet (inconsistent data).

• User Bob is created and as we are creating the Wallet, the HTTP connection drops. The wallet creation might have succeeded or it might have not.

What solutions are available to prevent this kind of data inconsistency from happening? Are there patterns that allow transactions to span multiple REST requests? I've read the Wikipedia page on Two-phase commit which seems to touch on this issue but I'm not sure how to apply it in practice. This Atomic Distributed Transactions: a RESTful design paper also seems interesting although I haven't read it yet.

Alternatively, I know REST might just not be suited for this use case. Would perhaps the correct way to handle this situation to drop REST entirely and use a different communication protocol like a message queue system? Or should I enforce consistency in my application code (for example, by having a background job that detects inconsistencies and fixes them or by having a "state" attribute on my User model with "creating", "created" values, etc.)?

Answer 1

All distributed systems have trouble with transactional consistency. The best way to do this is like you said, have a two-phase commit. Have the wallet and the user be created in a pending state. After it is created, make a separate call to activate the user.

This last call should be safely repeatable (in case your connection drops).

This will necessitate that the last call know about both tables (so that it can be done in a single JDBC transaction).

Alternatively, you might want to think about why you are so worried about a user without a wallet. Do you believe this will cause a problem? If so, maybe having those as separate rest calls are a bad idea. If a user shouldn't exist without a wallet, then you should probably add the wallet to the user (in the original POST call to create the user).

Answer 2

This is a classic question I was asked during an interview recently How to call multiple web services and still preserve some kind of error handling in the middle of the task. Today, in high performance computing, we avoid two phase commits. I read a paper many years ago about what was called the "Starbuck model" for transactions: Think about the process of ordering, paying, preparing and receiving the coffee you order at Starbuck... I oversimplify things but a two phase commit model would suggest that the whole process would be a single wrapping transaction for all the steps involved until you receive your coffee. However, with this model, all employees would wait and stop working until you get your coffee. You see the picture ?

Instead, the "Starbuck model" is more productive by following the "best effort" model and compensating for errors in the process. First, they make sure that you pay! Then, there are message queues with your order attached to the cup. If something goes wrong in the process, like you did not get your coffee, it is not what you ordered, etc, we enter into the compensation process and we make sure you get what you want or refund you, This is the most efficient model for increased productivity.

Sometimes, starbuck is wasting a coffee but the overall process is efficient. There are other tricks to think when you build your web services like designing them in a way that they can be called any number of times and still provide the same end result. So, my recommendation is:

• Don't be too fine when defining your web services (I am not convinced about the micro-service hype happening these days: too many risks of going too far);

• Async increases performance so prefer being async, send notifications by email whenever possible.

• Build more intelligent services to make them "recallable" any number of times, processing with an uid or taskid that will follow the order bottom-top until the end, validating business rules in each step;

• Use message queues (JMS or others) and divert to error handling processors that will apply operations to "rollback" by applying opposite operations, by the way, working with async order will require some sort of queue to validate the current state of the process, so consider that;

• In last resort, (since it may not happen often), put it in a queue for manual processing of errors.

Let's go back with the initial problem that was posted. Create an account and create a wallet and make sure everything was done.

Let's say a web service is called to orchestrate the whole operation.

Pseudo code of the web service would look like this:

1. Call Account creation microservice, pass it some information and a some unique task id 1.1 Account creation microservice will first check if that account was already created. A task id is associated with the account's record. The microservice detects that the account does not exist so it creates it and stores the task id. NOTE: this service can be called 2000 times, it will always perform the same result. The service answers with a "receipt that contains minimal information to perform an undo operation if required".

2. Call Wallet creation, giving it the account ID and task id. Let's say a condition is not valid and the wallet creation cannot be performed. The call returns with an error but nothing was created.

3. The orchestrator is informed of the error. It knows it needs to abort the Account creation but it will not do it itself. It will ask the wallet service to do it by passing its "minimal undo receipt" received at the end of step 1.

4. The Account service reads the undo receipt and knows how to undo the operation; the undo receipt may even include information about another microservice it could have called itself to do part of the job. In this situation, the undo receipt could contain the Account ID and possibly some extra information required to perform the opposite operation. In our case, to simplify things, let's say is simply delete the account using its account id.

5. Now, let's say the web service never received the success or failure (in this case) that the Account creation's undo was performed. It will simply call the Account's undo service again. And this service should normaly never fail because its goal is for the account to no longer exist. So it checks if it exists and sees nothing can be done to undo it. So it returns that the operation is a success.

6. The web service returns to the user that the account could not be created.

This is a synchronous example. We could have managed it in a different way and put the case into a message queue targeted to the help desk if we don't want the system to completly recover the error". I've seen this being performed in a company where not enough hooks could be provided to the back end system to correct situations. The help desk received messages containing what was performed successfully and had enough information to fix things just like our undo receipt could be used for in a fully automated way.

I have performed a search and the microsoft web site has a pattern description for this approach. It is called the compensating transaction pattern:

Compensating transaction pattern

Answer 3

IMHO one of the key aspects of microservices architecture is that the transaction is confined to the individual microservice (Single responsibility principle).

In the current example, the User creation would be an own transaction. User creation would push a USER_CREATED event into an event queue. Wallet service would subscribe to the USER_CREATED event and do the Wallet creation.

Answer 4

Personally I like the idea of Micro Services, modules defined by the use cases, but as your question mentions, they have adaptation problems for the classical businesses like banks, insurance, telecom, etc...

Distributed transactions, as many mentioned, is not a good choice, people now going more for eventually consistent systems but I am not sure this will work for banks, insurance, etc....

I wrote a blog about my proposed solution, may be this can help you....

https://mehmetsalgar.wordpress.com/2016/11/05/micro-services-fan-out-transaction-problems-and-solutions-with-spring-bootjboss-and-netflix-eureka/

Answer 5

If my wallet was just another bunch of records in the same sql database as the user then I would probably place the user and wallet creation code in the same service and handle that using the normal database transaction facilities.

It sounds to me you are asking about what happens when the wallet creation code requires you touch another other system or systems? Id say it all depends on how complex and or risky the creation process is.

If it's just a matter of touching another reliable datastore (say one that can't participate in your sql transactions), then depending on the overall system parameters, I might be willing to risk the vanishingly small chance that second write won't happen. I might do nothing, but raise an exception and deal with the inconsistent data via a compensating transaction or even some ad-hoc method. As I always tell my developers: "if this sort of thing is happening in the app, it won't go unnoticed".

As the complexity and risk of wallet creation increases you must take steps to ameliorate the risks involved. Let's say some of the steps require calling multiple partner apis.

At this point you might introduce a message queue along with the notion of partially constructed users and/or wallets.

A simple and effective strategy for making sure your entities eventually get constructed properly is to have the jobs retry until they succeed, but a lot depends on the use cases for your application.

I would also think long and hard about why I had a failure prone step in my provisioning process.

Answer 6

Why not use API Management (APIM) platform that supports scripting/programming? So, you will be able to build composite service in the APIM without disturbing micro services. I have designed using APIGEE for this purpose.