Today almost all systems are distributed and have complex interactions between each other to provide useful functionality. In a software system, resilience is the ability to recover to a working condition after being affected by a serious incident. Ballerina has inbuilt functionality to make programs resilient for network failures. This slide deck explores how to build resilience patterns with Ballerina.

1. Senior Technical Lead, WSO2
Resilience Patterns with Ballerina
Isuru Udana

2. Bob is a developer who
works at the IT
Department of a
popular bank.
Bob

3. Bob was asked to develop
a mobile selfcare banking
application.

4. This mobile application
should be capable of
showing account balances
as well as details of past
transactions.

5. Legacy services are
already available.

6. But when he started to implement the application,
bob found issues with some of the legacy services.
Transient
Network Failures
Moderate Load
Intermittent
Failures

7. Bob found it very
difficult to build a
reliable application.

8. Resilient service
Bob got an idea!

9. Resilience

10. Ability to return to the
original form, position after
being affected by a particular
alteration
What is Resilience?

11. In a software system, resilience means ...
… the ability to recover to a working condition after being
affected by a serious incident
Resilience in Software Applications

12. “The probability of failure-free software operation for a
specified period of time in a specified environment.”
- The IEEE Reliability Society
• 100% operational all the time
Reliability and Resilience
Reliability
http://www.picserver.org/r/reliability.html

13. Focusing on Reliability is Enough...?

14. Distributed and complex systems
with many interactions are prone
to failures
Why Focusing on Reliability is Not
Enough
Systems are Complex and Prone to Failures

15. • Untested corner cases
• Minor mistakes can affect serious production
incidents
• Failures are unpredictable
Why Focusing on Reliability is Not
Enough
Avoiding Failures is Not Practical

16. • Handle unexpected situations
• When one feature is temporarily unavailable, the rest
of the application still runs
• Stop propagating errors happening at downstreams of
a complex system into upstreams
Resilience in Production

17. It’s All About Achieving
Availability of a Production
System!

18. Best case:
• User get’s a 100% availability of the
service
Typical case:
• User sees a graceful degradation of the
service
What Does it Mean to a User?

19. • Never expect systems to be 100% reliable
• Design systems thinking about connection issues,
down times, etc.
What Does it Mean to a developer ?

20. • Bulkhead
• Retry
• Circuit Breaker
• Timeout
• …
Resilience Patterns

21. Isolate components of an application into multiple pools.
If one component fails, others will continue to service
Bulkhead
Isolation

22. • Transient failures are not uncommon
• They recover by themselves
• Can be handled by
– Cancel
– Retry
– Retry with a delay
Retry
https://www.flickr.com/photos/markgregory/8184890333
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode

23. • Hide downstream latency and keep
the responsiveness to upstream
• Prevent waiting forever
Timeout

24. • Some transient failures takes
much longer to recover
• Repeatedly retrying may
hinder recoverability
• Retry up to a certain degree
and cut off
Circuit Breaker

25. Circuit Breaker
Fail/Keep Open
Reset Timeout
Fail
Success
Fail
(threshold not reached)
Fail
(threshold exceeded)
Success
Open
Half-OpenClosed
States in
circuit breaker

26. Resilience with Ballerina

27. • Designed to implement resilient programs/services
• Highly structured error and exception handling
Resilience with Ballerina

28. Back to the Story

29. Banking Service
Banking
Service
Account
Balance Service
Account
History Service
Mobile
Application
Can only handle
moderate load
Transient Failures
Sometimes takes a
long time to respond

30. Banking Service Account Balance
Legacy Service
Account
History
Legacy
Service
Account
Balance
Resource
Account
History
Resource

31. Banking Service
Account
Balance
Resource
Account
Balance Legacy
Service

32. Connectors, Connections and Endpoints
Endpoint
Connection
Params
Connector Options
Struct

33. Handling Transient Failures
Retry
Banking
Service
Account
Balance Service
Mobile
Application

34. Handling Transient Failures
Retry
Retry
Count
Retry
Delay
Options
Struct

35. Timeout
Timeout
Duration

36. Protect Services From Overload
Circuit Breaker
Retries Before
Suspension
Suspension
Duration

37. Applying Multiple Patterns
Circuit Breaker + Retry + Timeout
Circuit
Breaker
Retry
Timeout

38. Balancing Load
Banking
Service
Account
Balance Service 1
Mobile Application
Account
Balance Service 2

39. Balancing Load
Connectors

40. Story Continued ...
For priority
customers,
application should
provide zero
downtime.

41. Offering Different Quality of Services
Bulkhead
Banking
Service
Reliable
Service
Service got
Transient
Failures
Standard
Customer
Priority
Customer

42. Offering Different Quality of Services
Bulkhead
Reliable
Service
Service with
Transient Issues
Priority
Check
Function

43. Conclusion
● What is Resilience
● Reliability and resilience
● Resilience patterns
● Building resilience patterns with Ballerina

44. wso2.com