Reactive Design
Patterns
Dr. Roland Kuhn
@rolandkuhn — CTO Actyx AG

Reactive Design Patterns
• currently in MEAP
• all chapters done,
in pre-production
• use code 39kuhn (39% off),
see http://rolandkuhn.com
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Reactive?

Elasticity: Performance at Scale
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Resilience: Don’t put all eggs in one basket!
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Result: Responsiveness
• elastic components that scale with their load
• responses in the presence of partial failures
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Result: Decoupling
• containment of
• failures
• implementation details
• responsibility
• shared-nothing architecture, clear boundaries
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Result: Maintainability & Fexibility
• decoupled responsibility—decoupled teams
• develop pieces at their own pace
• continuous delivery
• Microservices: Single Responsibility Principle
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Implementation: Message-Driven
• focus on communication between
components
• model message flows and protocols
• common transports: async HTTP, *MQ, Actors
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Reactive Traits
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elastic resilient
responsive maintainable extensible
message-­‐driven
Value
Means
Form

Architecture Patterns

Basically: Microservices Best Practices
• Simple Component Pattern
• DeMarco in «Structured analysis and system specification»
(Yourdon, New York, 1979)
• “maximize cohesion and minimize coupling”
• Let-It-Crash Pattern
• Candea & Fox: “Crash-Only Software” (USENIX HotOS IX,
2003)
• Error Kernel Pattern
• Erlang (late 1980’s)
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Implementation Patterns

Request–Response Pattern
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«Include a return address in the message
in order to receive a response.»

Request–Response Pattern
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Request–Response Pattern
• return address is often implicit:
• HTTP response over same TCP connection
• automatic sender reference capture in Akka
• explicit return address is needed otherwise
• *MQ
• Akka Typed
• correlation ID needed for long-lived participants
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Circuit Breaker Pattern
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«Protect services by breaking the
connection during failure periods.»

Circuit Breaker Pattern
• well-known, inspired by electrical engineering
• first published by M. Nygard in «Release It!»
• protects both ways:
• allows client to avoid long failure timeouts
• gives service some breathing room to recover
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Circuit Breaker Example
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private object StorageFailed extends RuntimeException
private def sendToStorage(job: Job): Future[StorageStatus] = {
// make an asynchronous request to the storage subsystem
val f: Future[StorageStatus] = ???
// map storage failures to Future failures to alert the breaker
f.map {
case StorageStatus.Failed => throw StorageFailed
case other => other
}
}
private val breaker = CircuitBreaker(
system.scheduler, // used for scheduling timeouts
5, // number of failures in a row when it trips
300.millis, // timeout for each service call
30.seconds) // time before trying to close after tripping
def persist(job: Job): Future[StorageStatus] =
breaker
.withCircuitBreaker(sendToStorage(job))
.recover {
case StorageFailed => StorageStatus.Failed
case _: TimeoutException => StorageStatus.Unknown
case _: CircuitBreakerOpenException => StorageStatus.Failed
}

Multiple-Master Replication Patterns
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«Keep multiple distributed copies,
accept updates everywhere,
disseminate updates among replicas.»

Multiple-Master Replication Patterns
• this is a tough problem with no perfect solution
• requires a trade-off to be made between
consistency and availability
• consensus-based focuses on consistency
• conflict-free focuses on availability
• conflict resolution gives up a bit of both
• each requires a different programming model
and can express different transactional behavior
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Consensus-Based Replication
• strong coupling between replicas to ensure
that all are “on the same page”
• unavailable during network outages or certain
machine failures
• programming model “just like a single thread”
• Postgres, Zookeeper, etc.
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Replication with Conflict Resolution
• requires conflict detection
• resolution without user intervention will have to
discard some updates
• detection/resolution unavailable during partitions
• programming model “like single thread” with
caveat
• popular RDBMS in default configuration offer this
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Conflict-Free Replication
• express updates such that they can be merged
• cannot express “non-local” constraints
• all expressible updates can be performed under
any conditions without losses or inconsistencies
• replicas may temporarily be out of sync
• different programming model, explicitly distributed
• Riak 2.0, Akka Distributed Data
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Multiple-Master Replication Patterns
• no one size fits all
• you will have to think and decide!
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Saga Pattern
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«Divide long-lived distributed
transactions into quick local ones with
compensating actions for recovery.»

Saga Pattern: Background
• Microservice Architecture means distribution
of knowledge, no more central database
instance
• Pat Helland:
• “Life Beyond Distributed Transactions”, CIDR 2007
• “Memories, Guesses, and Apologies”, MSDN blog 2007
• What about transactions that affect multiple
microservices?
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Saga Pattern
• Garcia-Molina & Salem: “SAGAS”, ACM, 1987
• Bank transfer avoiding lock of both accounts:
• T₁: transfer money from X to local working account
• T₂: transfer money from local working account to Y
• C₁: compensate failure by transferring money back to X
• Compensating transactions are executed during
Saga rollback
• concurrent Sagas can see intermediate state
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Saga Pattern
• backward recovery:
T₁ T₂ T₃ C₃ C₂ C₁
• forward recovery with save-points:
T₁ (sp) T₂ (sp) T₃ (sp) T₄
• in practice Sagas need to be persistent to
recover after hardware failures, meaning
backward recovery will also use save-points
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Example: Bank Transfer
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trait Account {
def withdraw(amount: BigDecimal, id: Long): Future[Unit]
def deposit(amount: BigDecimal, id: Long): Future[Unit]
}
case class Transfer(amount: BigDecimal, x: Account, y: Account)
sealed trait Event
case class TransferStarted(amount: BigDecimal, x: Account, y: Account) extends Event
case object MoneyWithdrawn extends Event
case object MoneyDeposited extends Event
case object RolledBack extends Event

Example: Bank Transfer
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class TransferSaga(id: Long) extends PersistentActor {
import context.dispatcher
override val persistenceId: String = s"transaction-$id"
override def receiveCommand: PartialFunction[Any, Unit] = {
case Transfer(amount, x, y) =>
persist(TransferStarted(amount, x, y))(withdrawMoney)
}
def withdrawMoney(t: TransferStarted): Unit = {
t.x.withdraw(t.amount, id).map(_ => MoneyWithdrawn).pipeTo(self)
context.become(awaitMoneyWithdrawn(t.amount, t.x, t.y))
}
def awaitMoneyWithdrawn(amount: BigDecimal, x: Account, y: Account): Receive = {
case m @ MoneyWithdrawn => persist(m)(_ => depositMoney(amount, x, y))
}
...
}

Example: Bank Transfer
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def depositMoney(amount: BigDecimal, x: Account, y: Account): Unit = {
y.deposit(amount, id) map (_ => MoneyDeposited) pipeTo self
context.become(awaitMoneyDeposited(amount, x))
}
def awaitMoneyDeposited(amount: BigDecimal, x: Account): Receive = {
case Status.Failure(ex) =>
x.deposit(amount, id) map (_ => RolledBack) pipeTo self
context.become(awaitRollback)
case MoneyDeposited =>
persist(MoneyDeposited)(_ => context.stop(self))
}
def awaitRollback: Receive = {
case RolledBack =>
persist(RolledBack)(_ => context.stop(self))
}

Example: Bank Transfer
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override def receiveRecover: PartialFunction[Any, Unit] = {
var start: TransferStarted = null
var last: Event = null
{
case t: TransferStarted => { start = t; last = t }
case e: Event => last = e
case RecoveryCompleted =>
last match {
case null => // wait for initialization
case t: TransferStarted => withdrawMoney(t)
case MoneyWithdrawn => depositMoney(start.amount, start.x, start.y)
case MoneyDeposited => context.stop(self)
case RolledBack => context.stop(self)
}
}
}

Saga Pattern: Reactive Full Circle
• Garcia-Molina & Salem note:
• “search for natural divisions of the work being
performed”
• “it is the database itself that is naturally partitioned into
relatively independent components”
• “the database and the saga should be designed so that
data passed from one sub-transaction to the next via
local storage is minimized”
• fully aligned with Simple Components and isolation
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Conclusion

Conclusion
• reactive systems are distributed
• this requires new (old) architecture patterns
• … helped by new (old) code patterns &
abstractions
• none of this is dead easy: thinking is
required!
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