** This post has been rewritten and updated in May 2021 **

Given a modern distributed system, composed of multiple microservices, each possessing a sub-set of the domain’s aggregate data they need to perform their functions autonomously, we will almost assuredly have some duplication of data. Given this duplication, how do we maintain data consistency? In this two-part post, we will explore one possible solution to this challenge, using Apache Kafka and the model of eventual consistency.

I previously covered the topic of eventual consistency in a distributed system, using RabbitMQ, in the post, Eventual Consistency: Decoupling Microservices with Spring AMQP and RabbitMQ. This post is featured on Pivotal’s RabbitMQ website.

Introduction

To ground the discussion, let’s examine a common example of the online storefront. Using a domain-driven design (DDD) approach, we would expect our problem domain, the online storefront, to be composed of multiple bounded contexts. Bounded contexts would likely include Shopping, Customer Service, Marketing, Security, Fulfillment, Accounting, and so forth, as shown in the context map, below.

Given this problem domain, we can assume we have the concept of the Customer. Further, the unique properties that define a Customer are likely to be spread across several bounded contexts. A complete view of a Customer would require you to aggregate data from multiple contexts. For example, the Accounting context may be the system of record (SOR) for primary customer information, such as the customer’s name, contact information, contact preferences, and billing and shipping addresses. Marketing may possess additional information about the customer’s use of the store’s loyalty program. Fulfillment may maintain a record of all the orders shipped to the customer. Security likely holds the customer’s access credentials and privacy settings.

Below, Customer data objects are shown in yellow. Orange represents logical divisions of responsibility within each bounded context. These divisions will manifest themselves as individual microservices in our online storefront example. 

Distributed Data Consistency

If we agree that the architecture of our domain’s data model requires some duplication of data across bounded contexts, or even between services within the same contexts, then we must ensure data consistency. Take, for example, a change in a customer’s address. The Accounting context is the system of record for the customer’s addresses. However, to fulfill orders, the Shipping context might also need to maintain the customer’s address. Likewise, the Marketing context, who is responsible for direct-mail advertising, also needs to be aware of the address change, and update its own customer records.

If a piece of shared data is changed, then the party making the change should be responsible for communicating the change, without the expectation of a response. They are stating a fact, not asking a question. Interested parties can choose if, and how, to act upon the change notification. This decoupled communication model is often described as Event-Carried State Transfer, as defined by Martin Fowler, of ThoughtWorks, in his insightful post, What do you mean by “Event-Driven”?. A change to a piece of data can be thought of as a state change event. Coincidentally, Fowler also uses a customer’s address change as an example of Event-Carried State Transfer. The Event-Carried State Transfer Pattern is also detailed by fellow ThoughtWorker and noted Architect, Graham Brooks.

Consistency Strategies

Multiple architectural approaches could be taken to solve for data consistency in a distributed system. For example, you could use a single relational database to persist all data, avoiding the distributed data model altogether. Although I would argue, using a single database just turned your distributed system back into a monolith.

You could use Change Data Capture (CDC) to track changes to each database and send a record of those changes to Kafka topics for consumption by interested parties. Kafka Connect is an excellent choice for this, as explained in the article, No More Silos: How to Integrate your Databases with Apache Kafka and CDC, by Robin Moffatt of Confluent.

Alternately, we could use a separate data service, independent of the domain’s other business services, whose sole role is to ensure data consistency across domains. If messages are persisted in Kafka, the service have the added ability to provide data auditability through message replay. Of course, another set of services adds additional operational complexity.

Storefront Example

In this post, our online storefront’s services will be built using Spring Boot. Thus, we will ensure the uniformity of distributed data by using a Publish/Subscribe model with the Spring for Apache Kafka Project. When a piece of data is changed by one Spring Boot service, if appropriate, that state change will trigger an event, which will be shared with other services using Kafka topics.

We will explore different methods of leveraging Spring Kafka to communicate state change events, as they relate to the specific use case of a customer placing an order through the online storefront. An abridged view of the storefront ordering process is shown in the diagram below. The arrows represent the exchange of data. Kafka will serve as a means of decoupling services from each one another, while still ensuring the data is exchanged.

Given the use case of placing an order, we will examine the interactions of three services, the Accounts service within the Accounting bounded context, the Fulfillment service within the Fulfillment context, and the Orders service within the Order Management context. We will examine how the three services use Kafka to communicate state changes (changes to their data) to each other, in a decoupled manner.

The diagram below shows the event flows between sub-systems discussed in the post. The numbering below corresponds to the numbering in the ordering process above. We will look at event flows 2, 5, and 6. We will simulate event flow 3, the order being created by the Shopping Cart service. Kafka Producers may also be Consumers within our domain.

Below is a view of the online storefront, through the lens of the major sub-systems involved. Although the diagram is overly simplified, it should give you the idea of where Kafka, and Zookeeper, Kafka’s cluster manager, might sit in a typical, highly-available, microservice-based, distributed, application platform.

This post will focus on the storefront’s services, database, and messaging sub-systems.

Storefront Microservices

First, we will explore the functionality of each of the three microservices. We will examine how they share state change events using Kafka. Each storefront service is built using Spring Boot 2.0 and Gradle. Each Spring Boot service includes Spring Data REST, Spring Data MongoDB, Spring for Apache Kafka, Spring Cloud Sleuth, SpringFox, Spring Cloud Netflix Eureka, and Spring Boot Actuator. For simplicity, Kafka Streams and the use of Spring Cloud Stream is not part of this post.

Code samples in this post are displayed as Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

Accounts Service

The Accounts service is responsible for managing basic customer information, such as name, contact information, addresses, and credit cards for purchases. A partial view of the data model for the Accounts service is shown below. This cluster of domain objects represents the Customer Account Aggregate.

The Customer class, the Accounts service’s primary data entity, is persisted in the Accounts MongoDB database. A Customer, represented as a BSON document in the customer.accounts database collection, looks as follows (gist).

Along with the primary Customer entity, the Accounts service contains a CustomerChangeEvent class. As a Kafka producer, the Accounts service uses the CustomerChangeEvent domain event object to carry state information about the client the Accounts service wishes to share when a new customer is added, or a change is made to an existing customer. The CustomerChangeEvent object is not an exact duplicate of the Customer object. For example, the CustomerChangeEvent object does not share sensitive credit card information with other message Consumers (the CreditCard data object).

Since the CustomerChangeEvent domain event object is not persisted in MongoDB, to examine its structure, we can look at its JSON message payload in Kafka. Note the differences in the data structure between the Customer document in MongoDB and the Kafka CustomerChangeEvent message payload (gist).

For simplicity, we will assume other services do not make changes to the customer’s name, contact information, or addresses. It is the sole responsibility of the Accounts service.

Source code for the Accounts service is available on GitHub.

Orders Service

The Orders service is responsible for managing a customer’s past and current orders; it is the system of record for the customer’s order history. A partial view of the data model for the Orders service is shown below. This cluster of domain objects represents the Customer Orders Aggregate.

The CustomerOrders class, the Order service’s primary data entity, is persisted in MongoDB. This entity contains a history of all the customer’s orders (Order data objects), along with the customer’s name, contact information, and addresses. In the Orders MongoDB database, a CustomerOrders, represented as a BSON document in the customer.orders database collection, looks as follows (gist).

Along with the primary CustomerOrders entity, the Orders service contains the FulfillmentRequestEvent class. As a Kafka producer, the Orders service uses the FulfillmentRequestEvent domain event object to carry state information about an approved order, ready for fulfillment, which it sends to Kafka for consumption by the Fulfillment service. TheFulfillmentRequestEvent object only contains the information it needs to share. In our example, it shares a single Order, along with the customer’s name, contact information, and shipping address.

Since the FulfillmentRequestEvent domain event object is not persisted in MongoDB, we can look at it’s JSON message payload in Kafka. Again, note the structural differences between the CustomerOrders document in MongoDB and the FulfillmentRequestEvent message payload in Kafka (gist).

Source code for the Orders service is available on GitHub.

Fulfillment Service

Lastly, the Fulfillment service is responsible for fulfilling orders. A partial view of the data model for the Fulfillment service is shown below. This cluster of domain objects represents the Fulfillment Aggregate.

The Fulfillment service’s primary entity, the Fulfillment class, is persisted in MongoDB. This entity contains a single Order data object, along with the customer’s name, contact information, and shipping address. The Fulfillment service also uses the Fulfillment entity to store the latest shipping event, such as ‘Shipped’, ‘In Transit’, and ‘Received’. The customer’s name, contact information, and shipping addresses are managed by the Accounts service, replicated to the Orders service, and passed to the Fulfillment service, via Kafka, using the FulfillmentRequestEvent entity.

In the Fulfillment MongoDB database, a Fulfillment object, represented as a BSON document in the fulfillment.requests database collection, looks as follows (gist).

Along with the primary Fulfillment entity, the Fulfillment service has an OrderStatusChangeEvent class. As a Kafka producer, the Fulfillment service uses the OrderStatusChangeEvent domain event object to carry state information about an order’s fulfillment statuses. The OrderStatusChangeEvent object contains the order’s UUID, a timestamp, shipping status, and an option for order status notes.

Since the OrderStatusChangeEvent domain event object is not persisted in MongoDB, to examine it, we can again look at it’s JSON message payload in Kafka (gist).

Source code for the Fulfillment service is available on GitHub.

State Change Event Messaging Flows

There are three state change event messaging flows demonstrated in this post.

1. Change to a Customer triggers an event message by the Accounts service;
2. Order Approved triggers an event message by the Orders service;
3. Change to the status of an Order triggers an event message by the Fulfillment service;

Each of these state change event messaging flows follow the exact same architectural pattern on both the Producer and Consumer sides of the Kafka topic.

Let’s examine each state change event messaging flow and the code behind them.

Customer State Change

When a new Customer entity is created or updated by the Accounts service, a CustomerChangeEvent message is produced and sent to the accounts.customer.change Kafka topic. This message is retrieved and consumed by the Orders service. This is how the Orders service eventually has a record of all customers who may place an order. It can be said that the Order’s Customer contact information is eventually consistent with the Account’s Customer contact information, by way of Kafka.

There are different methods to trigger a message to be sent to Kafka, For this particular state change, the Accounts service uses a listener. The listener class, which extends AbstractMongoEventListener, listens for an onAfterSave event for a Customer entity (gist).

The listener handles the event by instantiating a new CustomerChangeEvent with the Customer’s information and passes it to the Sender class (gist).

The configuration of the Sender is handled by the SenderConfig class. This Spring Kafka producer configuration class uses Spring Kafka’s JsonSerializer class to serialize the CustomerChangeEvent object into a JSON message payload (gist).

The Sender uses a KafkaTemplate to send the message to the Kafka topic, as shown below. Since message order is critical to ensure changes to a Customer’s information are processed in order, all messages are sent to a single topic with a single partition.

The Orders service’s Receiver class consumes the CustomerChangeEvent messages, produced by the Accounts service (gist).

[gust]cc3c4e55bc291e5435eccdd679d03015[/gist]

The Orders service’s Receiver class is configured differently, compared to the Fulfillment service. The Orders service receives messages from multiple topics, each containing messages with different payload structures. Each type of message must be deserialized into different object types. To accomplish this, the ReceiverConfig class uses Apache Kafka’s StringDeserializer. The Orders service’s ReceiverConfig references Spring Kafka’s AbstractKafkaListenerContainerFactory classes setMessageConverter method, which allows for dynamic object type matching (gist).

Each Kafka topic the Orders service consumes messages from is associated with a method in the Receiver class (shown above). That method accepts a specific object type as input, denoting the object type the message payload needs to be deserialized into. In this way, we can receive multiple message payloads, serialized from multiple object types, and successfully deserialize each type into the correct data object. In the case of a CustomerChangeEvent, the Orders service calls the receiveCustomerOrder method to consume the message and properly deserialize it.

For all services, a Spring application.yaml properties file, in each service’s resources directory, contains the Kafka configuration (gist).

 Order Approved for Fulfillment

When the status of the Order in a CustomerOrders entity is changed to ‘Approved’ from ‘Created’, a FulfillmentRequestEvent message is produced and sent to the accounts.customer.change Kafka topic. This message is retrieved and consumed by the Fulfillment service. This is how the Fulfillment service has a record of what Orders are ready for fulfillment.

Since we did not create the Shopping Cart service for this post, the Orders service simulates an order approval event, containing an approved order, being received, through Kafka, from the Shopping Cart Service. To simulate order creation and approval, the Orders service can create a random order history for each customer. Further, the Orders service can scan all customer orders for orders that contain both a ‘Created’ and ‘Approved’ order status. This state is communicated as an event message to Kafka for all orders matching those criteria. A FulfillmentRequestEvent is produced, which contains the order to be fulfilled, and the customer’s contact and shipping information. The FulfillmentRequestEvent is passed to the Sender class (gist).

The configuration of the Sender class is handled by the SenderConfig class. This Spring Kafka producer configuration class uses the Spring Kafka’s JsonSerializer class to serialize the FulfillmentRequestEvent object into a JSON message payload (gist).

The Sender class uses a KafkaTemplate to send the message to the Kafka topic, as shown below. Since message order is not critical messages could be sent to a topic with multiple partitions if the volume of messages required it.

The Fulfillment service’s Receiver class consumes the FulfillmentRequestEvent from the Kafka topic and instantiates a Fulfillment object, containing the data passed in the FulfillmentRequestEvent message payload. This includes the order to be fulfilled and the customer’s contact and shipping information (gist).

The Fulfillment service’s ReceiverConfig class defines the DefaultKafkaConsumerFactory and ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory, responsible for deserializing the message payload from JSON into a FulfillmentRequestEvent object (gist).

Fulfillment Order Status State Change

When the status of the Order in a Fulfillment entity is changed to anything other than ‘Approved’, an OrderStatusChangeEvent message is produced by the Fulfillment service and sent to the fulfillment.order.change Kafka topic. This message is retrieved and consumed by the Orders service. This is how the Orders service tracks all CustomerOrder lifecycle events from the initial ‘Created’ status to the final happy path ‘Received’ status.

The Fulfillment service exposes several endpoints through the FulfillmentController class, which are simulate a change the status of an order. They allow an order status to be changed from ‘Approved’ to ‘Processing’, to ‘Shipped’, to ‘In Transit’, and to ‘Received’. This change is applied to all orders that meet the criteria.

Each of these state changes triggers a change to the Fulfillment document in MongoDB. Each change also generates an Kafka message, containing the OrderStatusChangeEvent in the message payload. This is handled by the Fulfillment service’s Sender class.

Note in this example, these two events are not handled in an atomic transaction. Either the updating the database or the sending of the message could fail independently, which would cause a loss of data consistency. In the real world, we must ensure both these disparate actions succeed or fail as a single transaction, to ensure data consistency (gist).

The configuration of the Sender class is handled by the SenderConfig class. This Spring Kafka producer configuration class uses the Spring Kafka’s JsonSerializer class to serialize the OrderStatusChangeEvent object into a JSON message payload. This class is almost identical to the SenderConfig class in the Orders and Accounts services (gist).

The Sender class uses a KafkaTemplate to send the message to the Kafka topic, as shown below. Message order is not critical since a timestamp is recorded, which ensures the proper sequence of order status events can be maintained. Messages could be sent to a topic with multiple partitions if the volume of messages required it.

The Orders service’s Receiver class is responsible for consuming the OrderStatusChangeEvent message, produced by the Fulfillment service (gist).

As explained above, the Orders service is configured differently compared to the Fulfillment service, to receive messages from Kafka. The Orders service needs to receive messages from more than one topic. The ReceiverConfig class deserializes all message using the StringDeserializer. The Orders service’s ReceiverConfig class references the Spring Kafka AbstractKafkaListenerContainerFactory classes setMessageConverter method, which allows for dynamic object type matching (gist).

Each Kafka topic the Orders service consumes messages from is associated with a method in the Receiver class (shown above). This method accepts a specific object type as an input parameter, denoting the object type the message payload needs to be deserialized into. In the case of an OrderStatusChangeEvent message, the receiveOrderStatusChangeEvents method is called to consume a message from the fulfillment.order.change Kafka topic.

Part Two

In Part Two of this post, I will briefly cover how to deploy and run a local development version of the storefront components, using Docker. The storefront’s microservices will be exposed through an API Gateway, Netflix’s Zuul. Service discovery and load balancing will be handled by Netflix’s Eureka. Both Zuul and Eureka are part of the Spring Cloud Netflix project. To provide operational visibility, we will add Yahoo’s Kafka Manager and Mongo Express to our system.

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.