If the consumer makes a change which can break the contract test can only be identified if producer is also build but if we don't build the producer the wrong consumer will be released to production.
Is there an approach which can be followed to overcome these type of scenarios.
Yes, there is definitely an approach! We go into length about this on our article how to build an effective Pact pipeline.
Some of the key tips described in the article:
It is recommended to setup a Pact Broker (https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact_broker/) or use a hosted service like pactflow.io to facilitate the contract exchange and CI/CD workflow
You should use can-i-deploy to prevent consumers/providers releasing a change that will break the integration
You can use tags and pending pacts (relatively new feature) to manage the introduction of new contracts into the system safely.
Related
I am very new on RabbitMQ World and Microservices Architecture. I've watched some tutorials on youtube how to use rabbitMQ but there are some questions I would like to ask.
1.) If the client post the data to my api controller and my api controller publish the data into queue, what is the proper way to respond the post request while the data is being processed on rabbitMQ? Because from the tutorial, It just returns "Ok (Http Code 200)" even though the data is not still completed yet.
2.) Can consumer subscribe more than 1 queue? If yes, is there any configuration sample on startup.cs?
3.) Is there any sample using rabbitMQ on .NetCore for "Real World" cases? Please let me know.
Thanks
It's perfectly okey to return 200. That's just one of many tradeoffs for microservices architecture. E.g. from the performance perspective, it's efficient that you can return early with 200 and propagate all the changes asynchronously through the rest of the distributed system. On the other hand, it adds another type of complexity that you need to embrace - Eventual Consistency. This concept kind of describes what you asked about. Let say your client received 200, but if it immediately calls another microservice the client may not see changes introduced by the previous request, because there is a probability that the changes haven't propagated yet. You need to decide whether it's acceptable in your project or not. If not maybe you should redesign how you split your business domain into microservices, trying to group transactionally close to each other entities together in order to mitigate such problems. If you can't really tolerate Eventual Consistency maybe you should give up on microservices for the particular project.
Yes it can, you could for example create an implementation of IHostedService for each queue listening for messages and run them in parallel with your asp net core app by registering them in the starutp.cs
You'll find this in the repository from the below's links. They use RabbitMQ. Although, there's a bit of abstraction which can make it harder to grasp, it's a great implementation with a bonus of being documented in the free ebook.
https://github.com/dotnet-architecture/eShopOnContainers/ - I can't stress enough how this repository helped me with understanding microservices. There's also a free ebook from Microsoft docs about this repo: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/microservices/ . They tackle concepts such as Eventual Consistency and asynchronous communication. It's exactly what you look for.
I am new to contract testing and trying to do a PoC using Karate framework. I know Pact (another contract testing tool) used for contract testing where in contracts and verification results between consumer and provider projects are managed using Pact broker.
When it comes to Karate, please advise on what functionality in Karate framwork performs similar roles of Pact broker(managing contracts and verification results).
Appreciating your help on this.
Karate does not have the equivalent of the broker. It is possible to achieve contract testing without a broker if the Producer and Consumer have access to the mock and test. Git is typically the best way to share these artifacts. Since they are plain-text files, even email would suffice.
So you don't need to stand up a server and go through all the complications of keeping it running and accessible by both teams and worry about the security implications of if the Producer or Consumer is outside your firewall.
Note that if you genuinely have a case where the Producer or Consumer is not part of your corporate organization, you have a bigger problem to solve - which is to get that team to agree to follow the Consumer Driven Contract flow.
But if you are trying to do CDC where the producer and consumer are 2 teams within the same organization, Karate is more than sufficient. You just need a Git repo. The mock becomes a "deliverable" for the Producer team. The only thing you may miss is the visualization of "which teams depend on which service", which IMHO is not a big deal, it is just a pretty picture you can do without. The advantage of Karate is all the complex assertions that you can achieve and that you can continue to write normal tests, as long as the mock is "smart" enough to reply to those tests.
Skip to 33:30 of this video for an explanation: https://youtu.be/yu3uupBZyxc?t=2013
And read this article for a detailed explanation of what you should expect from a Contract Testing tool: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/api-contract-testing-visual-guide-peter-thomas/
We have to choose the best way of implementing RabbitMQ Queue.
We have two approaches
1. Create a Queue and Bind using #Bean and Queue class in Spring.
2. Create a Queue in RabbitMQ web console itself.
We need to know which is the best way the Programming way or Console way and Why?
IMHO, the better way is using the web console. Queue is an infrastructure and will be used by many applications. You should not provide full control of the infrastructure to applications. It should be maintained by the admin.
Also please consider the following aspects.
Security
Ease of use
Threats
I haven't found an existing post asking this but apologize if I missed it.
I'm trying to get my head round microservices and have come across articles where RabbitMQ is used. I'm confused why RabbitMQ is needed. Is the intention that the services will use a web api to communicate with the outside world and RabbitMQ to communicate with each other?
In Microservices architecture you have two ways to communicate between the microservices:
Synchronous - that is, each service calls directly the other microservice , which results in dependency between the services
Asynchronous - you have some central hub (or message queue) where you place all requests between the microservices and the corresponding service takes the request, process it and return the result to the caller. This is what RabbitMQ (or any other message queue - MSMQ and Apache Kafka are good alternatives) is used for. In this case all microservices know only about the existance of the hub.
microservices.io has some very nice articles about using microservices
A message queue provide an asynchronous communications protocol - You have the option to send a message from one service to another without having to know if another service is able to handle it immediately or not. Messages can wait until the responsible service is ready. A service publishing a message does not need know anything about the inner workings of the services that will process that message. This way of handling messages decouple the producer from the consumer.
A message queue will keep the processes in your application separated and independent of each other; this way of handling messages could create a system that is easy to maintain and easy to scale.
Simply put, two obvious cases can be used as examples of when message queues really shine:
For long-running processes and background jobs
As the middleman in between microservices
For long-running processes and background jobs:
When requests take a significant amount of time, it is the perfect scenario to incorporate a message queue.
Imagine a web service that handles multiple requests per second and cannot under any circumstances lose one. Plus the requests are handled through time-consuming processes, but the system cannot afford to be bogged down. Some real-life examples could include:
Images Scaling
Sending large/many emails (like newsletters)
Search engine indexing
File scanning
Video encoding
Delivering notifications
PDF processing
Calculations
The middleman in between microservices:
For communication and integration within and between applications, i.e. as the middleman between microservices, a message queue is also useful. Think of a system that needs to notify another part of the system to start to work on a task or when there are a lot of requests coming in at the same time, as in the following scenarios:
Order handling (Order placed, update order status, send an order, payment, etc.)
Food delivery service (Place an order, prepare an order, deliver food)
Any web service that needs to handle multiple requests
Here is a story explaining how Parkster (a digital parking service) are breaking down their system into multiple microservices by using RabbitMQ.
This guide follow a scenario where a web application allows users to upload information to a web site. The site will handle this information and generate a PDF and email it back to the user. Handling the information, generating the PDF and sending the email will in this example case take several seconds and that is one of the reasons of why a message queue will be used.
Here is a story about how and why CloudAMQP used message queues and RabbitMQ between microservices.
Here is a story about the usage of RabbitMQ in an event-based microservices architecture to support 100 million users a month.
And finally a link to Kontena, about why they chose RabbitMQ for their microservice architecture: "Because we needed a stable, manageable and highly-available solution for messaging.".
Please note that I work for the company behind CloudAMQP (hosting provider of RabbitMQ).
The same question can be why REST is necessary for microservices? Microservice concept is not something new under moon. A long time distribution of workflow was used for backend engineering and asynchronous request processing, Microservice is the same component in a separated jvm which matches with S(single responsibility) in SOLID. What makes it micro SERVICE - is that it is balanced. And that is the all! Particularly (!), it can be REST Service on Spring Cloud/REST base, which is registered by Eureka, has proxy gateway and load balancing over Zuul and Ribbon. But it is not the whole world of microservices!By the way, asynchronous distributed processing is one of tasks which microservices are used for. Long time ago services(components) in separated JVM was integrated over any messaging and the pattern is known as ESB. Microservices are the same subjects the pattern. Due to fashion for Spring Cloud REST seems like it is the only way of microservices. Nope! Message based asynchronous microservice architecture is supported by Vertx https://dzone.com/articles/asynchronous-microservices-with-vertx, for example. Why not to use RabbitMQ as message channel? In this case load balancing can be provided by building RabbitMQ cluster. For example:https://codeburst.io/using-rabbitmq-for-microservices-communication-on-docker-a43840401819. So, world is much wide more.
To make an OO system as decoupled as possible, I'm thinking of the following approach:
1) we run an RMI/directory like service where objects can register and discover each other. They talk to this service through an interface
2) we run a messaging service to which objects can publish messages, and register subscription callbacks. Again, this happens through interfaces
3) when object A wants to invoke a method on object B, it discovers the target object's unique identity through #1 above, and publishes a message on the message service for object B
4) message services invokes B's callback to give it the message
5) B processes the request and sends the response for A on message service
6) A's callback is called and it gets the response.
I feel this system is as decoupled as practically possible, but it has the following problems:
1) communication is typically asynchronous
2) hence it's non real time
3) the system as a whole is less efficient.
Are there any other practical problems where this design obviously won't be applicable ? What are your thoughts on this design in general ?
Books
Enterprise Integration Patterns
It appears he's talking about using a Message Oriented Middleware
Here are some things to consider
Security
What will prevent another rogue service from registering as a key component in your system. You will need way to validate and verify that services are who they say they are. This can be done through a PKI system. There are scenarios that you might not need to do this, if your system is hosted entirely on your intranet. IF that is the case Social Engineering and Rogue Employees will be your biggest threat.
Contract
What kind of contract will your clients have with the services? Will messages all be serialized as XML and sent as a TextMessage? If you use a pure byte message you'll have to be careful about byte order if your services are to run on multiple platforms.
Synchronization
Most developers are not able to comprehend and utilize asynchronous messages correctly. Where possible it might be in the best interest of your design to create a way to invoke "synchronous" messages. I've done this in the past by creating a sendMessageAndWait() method with a timeout and a return object. Within the method you can create a temporary topic id to receive the response, register a listener for it, then use locks to wait for a message to be returned on your temporary topic.
Unsolicited Messages
What happens if you want to allow your service(s) to send unsolicited messages to your clients? A critical event happened in Service A and it must notify your clients or possibly a Watch Dog service. Allow for your design to register for a common communication channel for services to communicate with clients without clients initiating the conversation.
Failover
What happens if a critical service processing your credit cards goes down? You'll need to implement a Failover and Watch Dog service to ensure that your key infrastructure is always up and running. You could register a list of services within your registry then your register could give out the primary service, falling back to a secondary service if your primary stops communicating. Or if your Message Oriented Middleware can handle Round Robin messaging you might be able to register all the services on the same topic. Think about creating a way to know when a service has died. Since most messages are Asynchronous it will be difficult to determine when a service has gone offline. This can be done with a Heartbeat and Watch Dog.
I've created this type of system a few times in my past for large systems that needed to communicate. If you and other developers understand the pros and cons of such a system it can be very powerful and flexible.
The biggest piece of advice I can give is to build a toolkit for your other developers so they don't have to think about how to register a service, or implement failover, or respond to messages from a client. These are the sorts of things that will kill your system and have others say it is too complicated. Making it painless for them will allow your system to work the way you need it with flexibility and decoupling while not burdening your developers with understanding enterprise design patterns.
This is not a Ivory Tower Architect/Architecture. It would be if he said, "This is how it will do done, now go do it and don't bother me about it because I know I'm right." If you really wanted to reference a Anti-Pattern it could be Kitchen Sink, maybe. Nah now that I think about it, it isn't Kitchen Sink either.
If you can find one please post it as a comment.
Anti-Patterns
Coupling is simply a balance between efficiency and re-usability. If you wish the modules of your system to be as reusable as possible then that will undoubtedly come at a cost.
Personally I think it best to define some key assumptions which may tighten coupling, but bring increased efficiency.
There are design patterns which never see the light of day just because the benefit they provide is not worth the cost in complexity.
What's the simplest thing that could possibly work? Do modularize into reasonable size routines, but avoid interfaces, services, messages and all of this unless you are going to have multiple implementations or multiple hardware resources to divide a job.
Make it simple, then refactor those parts that turned out to matter.