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Microservice A has dependency on Microservice B &C. When client calls a certain endpoint on service A, that will cause multiple HTTP requests to services B & C from A to get the dependent details. What would be the optimal, performance effective design pattern or approach to handle this scenario simultaneously?

NB : We are not using API gateway in this case.

Nicholas K
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shabinjo
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  • You should generally try to develop microservices independently. If this is not possible, you could use a publish/subscribe mechanismn to notify the services about relevant events. This solves the _too many dependencies_ problem between microservices. If this is also not possible (you need to trigger businness logic), always consider asnc call to the remote service. – Glains Aug 21 '18 at 11:05

1 Answers1

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Based on your question I assume there is no ability to leverage the event-based/reactive approach, and architectural decision is already made with tradeoffs as considered here (note, in this source the approach proposed below is referenced as a 'Hybrid').

Orchestration

Under these conditions, the pattern you're looking for is called Orchestration. Check out this great answer for wider overview.

As a quick recap, you can use something like Spring Integration to implement the following key points:

  • While processing the request to A, execute calls to B & C concurrently where possible to achieve quickest response time from A
  • Accumulate, transform and aggregate the results of concurrent calls into complete response entity
  • Leverage thread pools to limit concurrently-running requests to B and C to prevent amplification of cascading failures
  • Fail fast: early cancel the subsequent bunch of calls if some of requests fails (i.e. do not call C if call to B was not successful)
  • Cut-off: involve the maximal processing time you can wait for completion of currently-running bunch of calls to B & C and respond with error by A upon elapsed

Update - rely on implementation of Reactor pattern on client side

If you can use Spring 5/Spring Boot 2.x, you can also make the calls to B & C in a reactive way using Spring WebFlux based on Project Reactor to achieve above points.

Schematically, you can do something like:

@Service
public class MyService {

    private final WebClient webClient;

    ...

    public Mono<Details> someRestCall(String name) {
        return this.webClient.get().url("{name}/details", name)
                        .retrieve().bodyToMono(ResponseEntity.class);
    }

}

...


Mono<ResponseEntity> b1 = myService.someRestCall("serviceB");
Mono<ResponseEntity> c1 = myService.someRestCall("serviceC");
Mono<ResponseEntity> b2 = myService.someOtherRestCall("serviceB");

ResponseEntity response = Flux
       .parallel(NUM_CPUS)
       .merge(b1, c1, b2)
       .limitRequest(MAX_REQUESTS)
       .onErrorReturn(ERR_RESPONSE_ENTITY)
       .blockLast(CUTOFF_TIMEOUT);

(based on this example)

Kostiantyn
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