Towards Transactional Causal Consistent Microservices Business Logic

TL;DR

This paper proposes an extension to microservices aggregates to support transactional causal consistency, reducing complexity in business logic design, validated through a simulator that demonstrates improved simplicity.

Contribution

It introduces a new transactional causal consistent aggregate model and provides a simulator for experimentation, enhancing microservices design with causal consistency.

Findings

Reduced implementation complexity in microservices

Simulator available for further experimentation

Supports causal consistency in business logic

Abstract

Microservices architecture has been widely adopted to develop software systems, but some of its trade-offs are often ignored. In particular, the introduction of eventual consistency has a huge impact on the complexity of the application business logic design. Recent proposals to use transactional causal consistency in serverless computing seems promising, because it reduces the number of possible concurrent execution anomalies that can occur due to the lack of isolation. We propose an extension of the aggregate concept, the basic building block of microservices design, that is transactional causal consistent compliant. A simulator for the enriched aggregates is developed to allow the experimentation of this approach with a business logic rich system. The experiment results shown a reduction of the implementation complexity. The simulator is a publicly available reusable artifact that can be used in other experiments.