Udi Dahan   Udi Dahan – The Software Simplist
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Archive for the ‘Scalability’ Category



Logically Distributed, Physically Centralized

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

centralized-distributedWhen people pull back the covers on something like MSMQ, particularly its private queues (the way NServiceBus uses it), and they see that MSMQ is storing its messages in C:WindowsSystem32, well, they’re not particularly happy.

One of the reasons they worry about these types of distributed or federated queue-based solutions has to do with physical failures. The concern is that messages would be lost if there was a hard drive failure.

The preference for centralized message broker type solutions is that we can set it up on a nice RAID infrastructure that will take care of any physical reliability concerns. (Just so that we’re clear here – I’m talking about an single datacenter, possibly connected to a disaster recovery site.)

So, here’s the thing:

Virtualization

You see, in a virtualized production environment, the C drive of a virtual machine is physically in the image file of that VM, which is sitting on a SAN (storage area network).

What that means is that when a message is sent from one processing node to another, the data of that message ends up being written to the SAN, with all of its redundant disks. Even if one of the machines has a critical failure and cannot start up again, all the VMs that were running on it can be started up on a different machine without any message loss.

In fact, most virtualized environments have monitoring and management capabilities built-in so that the VMs will be brought up automatically on another machine. Even if you aren’t using messaging, there are so many other benefits that virtualization brings that you probably should be planning on putting it in, if you haven’t already.

Databases too

In fact, many people do the same thing with databases.
The file partitions on which the database server actually stores its data are on the SAN.

Think about that for a second.

All the data in messages flowing through your queues, and the data in the database, on a SAN. This gives you the ability to do a fully consistent backup of the entire system with SAN snapshots, not to mention ship those to your disaster recovery site.

In closing

Distributed solutions are often misunderstood.
Bad experiences in the past with MSMQ can color perceptions in the present.

The thing is that today’s infrastructure is set up to handle distributed solutions much better.
Developers no longer have to turn to centralized broker or database technologies to get the centralized backup and restore capabilities administrators look for.

If you’ve been avoiding NServiceBus for these reasons, give it a try. Not only will it make your life as a developer easier, combined with this virtualization thing, it will make your administrators life easier too.



NServiceBus in Insurance – Testimonial

Friday, March 30th, 2012

Getting more companies willing to go on the record about their usage of NServiceBus.

Update: Check out full list of customers.

Here’s a testimonial from a large insurance company whose name always had me wondering…

if_logoIf P & C Insurance is the leading property and casualty insurance company in the Nordic countries with 3.6 million customers and 6400 employees. NServiceBus was chosen as the ESB for one of our core insurance systems and is currently processing around 100,000 insurance policies a month. We expect that number to double within a year.

The support NServiceBus provides around asynchronous messaging and publish/subscribe communication makes the implementation of Service Oriented Architectures very straightforward. While the performance and scalability of the platform is able to handle the massive loads we’re under, we’re just as pleased with how quickly developers are able to get started with NServiceBus – even those coming into the project later on benefit from the maintainability of NServiceBus-centric code. We already have over 30 developers using it.

Looking forwards, we will be using NServiceBus on more systems at ever larger scales.



Common CQRS Abuses

Sunday, February 26th, 2012

Abuse #1

“I’m using CQRS because I need to scale.”

While CQRS may be more scalable than other more traditional architectures, the use of asynchronous communication often complicates the user interaction model causing users to not see the changes they made to data in the UI until later. Trying to compensate for this (by writing even more code) digs one deeper into the complexity hole.

When I point to non-collaborative subdomains and state “You don’t need CQRS for that”, the reason is that in these areas you don’t tend to have much read/write contention. While multiple users/actors may be working in parallel, they don’t touch the same set of data (or do so only very rarely).

In these environments, all you need is a scalable data storage technology – something designed to scale-out (unlike most relational databases). This can take the form of NOSQL databases like HBase and Cassandra. Often all you need is the UI to query that directly and show the results, and the same goes for persisting the data back – possibly with some basic validation and calculation code on the side.

No commands, events, DTOs, publish/subscribe, domain model, etc.

As Ayende says – JFHCI, just f-ing hard code it.

You’d be surprised how much of your data this approach can apply to.

With the time you save on all the less important stuff, you’ll have more time to apply CQRS the right way for the high-value/high-complexity parts of your system.

***

Just a final note, as registration for my course in New York is coming to a close in 2 weeks, I wanted to let you all know that the price for the course will be going up this April, after the course in Sydney. The reason for this is that the courses I run myself (at the current rate) have been cannibalizing attendees from the partner companies I do the course with.

I’ll be providing significant discounts to independent consultants (and others paying their own way) to try to keep things fair. Hope to see you there.

Go to the registration page.



The Myth Of “Infinite Scalability”

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

globeScalability is a topic near and dear to my heart.

Many a client seeks me out for the first time for help in this area.

Usually the request is for an amount substantially smaller than infinity.

It’s usually on the discussion groups and in conference presentations that infinity is brought into it.

The basics

The first issue with scalability is the use of the word as an adjective: scalable.

“Is the system scalable?”

Or the similar verb use: “Does it scale?”

The problem here is the implication that there is a yes/no answer to the question.

Scalability is not boolean.

Linear Scalability

scalabilityWhen people talk about scalability, or a system being able to scale, they’re usually referring to a graph that looks something like this:

The red graph indicating a system that does not scale well, the green graph indicating one that does.

What is missing from this diagram are the labels of the axes.

The Y axis is Cost, Expense, or Money.
The X axis is usually the number of users (for internet-type companies).

Ultimately, scalability is a cost-function that will tell us how much it will cost to have the system support a certain number of users.

Linear scalability is when the cost of the next user is the same as the cost of the previous user. This means our system doesn’t have bottlenecks. This is what people usually mean when they say “infinite scalability”.

But there’s more

As many of the internet companies (and their investors) have realized over the years, there’s a difference between the number of users and the number of active users. It’s very easy to scale to a billion users when only 1000 of them are active at any given time.

To be more accurate, what we want is additional X-axes for things like total data managed by the system, number of requests per user, resource utilization per request, propagation speed (how quickly information entered by one user needs to be visible to others), and more.

Scalability is a multi-dimensional cost function, where part of an architects job is to figure out which dimensions are significant for the system/business, and what the expectation for growth is across each axis.

Preparing for “infinity”

Be careful not to optimize for only a single dimension – reality is a whole lot more complex.

There are so many other things to deal with as a system scales.

For example, do you really think you’re going to want your configuration entirely centralized? Putting everything in one place means easier management, yes, but it also means a mistake will instantly affect everyone. Is it worth the risk? Maybe instead of centralization, we could do with some automation that will allow a staged rollout of configuration changes with the ability to rollback.

The same goes for rolling out new versions, patches, and upgrades.

But that now means we may have multiple versions of the same system in production at the same time. How will that work? Will they all talk to the same database? How will we version the database then? If not, how will we handle state? Won’t this mean our code will have to be backwards compatible from one version to another? Isn’t that hard? Like, insanely hard?

Please, can we park the whole “infinite scalability” thing?
It’s really not the most important concern – not by a long shot.



When to avoid CQRS

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

which way?It looks like that CQRS has finally “made it” as a full blown “best practice”.

Please accept my apologies for my part in the overly-complex software being created because of it.

I’ve tried to do what I could to provide a balanced view on the topic with posts like Clarified CQRS and Race Conditions Don’t Exist.

It looks like that wasn’t enough, so I’ll go right out and say it:

Most people using CQRS (and Event Sourcing too) shouldn’t have done so.

Should we really go back to N-Tier?

When not using CQRS (which is the majority of the time), you don’t need N-Tier either.

You see, if you’re not in a collaborative domain then you don’t have multiple writers to the same logical set of data as an inherent property of your domain. As such, having a single database where all data lives isn’t really necessary.

Data is inherently partitioned by who owns it.

Let’s take the online shopping cart as an example. There aren’t any use cases where users operate on each others’ carts – ergo, not collaborative, therefore not a good candidate for CQRS. Same goes for user profiles, and tons of other cases.

So why is it that we need a separate tier to run our business logic?

Originally, the application server tier was introduced for improved scalability, but specifically around managing the connection pool to the database. Increasing numbers of clients (when each had its own user/account for connecting to the database) caused problems. Luckily, most web applications side-step this problem – that is, until someone got the idea that the web server was only supposed to run the UI layer, and the Business Logic layer would be on a separate application server tier.

Rubbish – see Fowler’s First Law of Distribution: Don’t.

Keep it all on one tier. Same goes for smart clients.
No, Silverlight, you don’t count – architecturally speaking, you’re a glorified browser.

But what about scalability?

In a non-collaborative domain, where you can horizontally add more database servers to support more users/requests/data at the same time you’re adding web servers – there is no real scalability problem (caveat, until you’re Amazon/Google/Facebook scale).

Database servers can be cheap – if using MySQL/SQL Express/others.

But what about the built-in event-log CQRS/ES gives us?

Architectural gold-plating / stealing from the business.

Who put you in a position to decide that development time and resources should be diverted from short-term business-value-adding features to support a non-functional requirement that the business didn’t ask for?

If you sat down with them, explaining the long-term value of having an archive of all actions in the system, and they said OK, build this into the system from the beginning, that would be fine. Most people who ask me about CQRS and/or Event Sourcing skip this step.

Finally, you can usually implement this specific requirement with some simple interception and logging. Don’t over-engineer the solution. If using messaging, you can get this by turning on journaling, or if you want to centralize this archive, NServiceBus can forward all messages to a specific queue.

Don’t forget that this storage has a cost – including administration. Nothing is free.

What about the “proof of correctness” in Event Sourcing

I’ve heard statements made that when you use the events that flowed into/through your system AS your system’s data, rather than transforming those events to some other schema (relational or otherwise) and storing the result – you can prove that your system behaves correctly.

Let me put it this way:

No programming technique used by humans will prevent those same humans from creating bugs.
No testing technique used by humans will prevent those same humans from not catching those bugs.
* Automated tests – see programming technique.

While having a full archive of all events can allow us to roll the system back to some state, fix a bug, and roll forwards, that assumes that we’re in a closed system. We have users which are outside the system. If a user made a decision based on data influenced by the bug, there’s no automated way for us to know that, or correct for it as we roll forwards.

In short, we’re interested in the business’ behavior – as composed of user and system behavior. No proof can exist.

Umm, so where should we use it

If you’ve uncovered a scenario where you’re wondering “first-one-wins, or last-one-wins”, that’s often a good candidate for a place where CQRS could make sense. Then re-read my Race Conditions Don’t Exist post.

Also, CQRS should not be your top-level architectural pattern – that would be SOA.
CQRS, if used at all, would be used inside a service boundary only.

Given that SOA guides us away from having a given 3rd normal form entity exist in any one service, it is unlikely that the building blocks of your CQRS design will be those kinds of entities. Most 3rd normal form one-to-many and many-to-many relationships simply do not exist when doing SOA and CQRS properly.

Therefore, I’m sorry to say that most sample application you’ll see online that show CQRS are architecturally wrong. I’d also be extremely wary of frameworks that guide you towards an entity-style aggregate root CQRS model.

In Summary

So, when should you avoid CQRS?

The answer is most of the time.

Here’s the strongest indication I can give you to know that you’re doing CQRS correctly: Your aggregate roots are sagas.

And the biggest caveat – the above are generalizations, and can’t necessarily be true for every specific scenario. If you’re Greg Young, then you probably can (and will) decide on your own on these matters. For everybody else, please take these warnings to heart. There have been far too many clients that have come to me all mixed up with their use CQRS in areas where it wasn’t warranted.

If you want to know everything you need to know to apply CQRS appropriately, please come to my course – there is so much unlearning to do first that just can’t happen via a series of blog posts.



CQRS Video Online

Friday, February 26th, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk on Command/Query Responsibility Segregation in London.

The recording of the talk is online here.

There is one important thing that I didn’t have enough time to cover, but I want you to keep in mind as you’re watching this. It is that CQRS is applicable only *within* the context of a single service/BC – NOT across or between them.

Let me know what you think.



Scalability Podcast on Herding Code

Monday, January 11th, 2010

The great folks over at Herding Code were nice enough to interview me back in November as I was over in Paris giving my 5-day SOA course. We talked about quite a lot of topics related to scalability.

Click here for the full list of topics and to download the podcast.

Let me know what you think or any questions you may have in the comments.



Clarified CQRS

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

clarification
After listening how the community has interpreted Command-Query Responsibility Segregation I think that the time has come for some clarification. Some have been tying it together to Event Sourcing. Most have been overlaying their previous layered architecture assumptions on it. Here I hope to identify CQRS itself, and describe in which places it can connect to other patterns.

Download as PDF – this is quite a long post.

Why CQRS

Before describing the details of CQRS we need to understand the two main driving forces behind it: collaboration and staleness.

Collaboration refers to circumstances under which multiple actors will be using/modifying the same set of data – whether or not the intention of the actors is actually to collaborate with each other. There are often rules which indicate which user can perform which kind of modification and modifications that may have been acceptable in one case may not be acceptable in others. We’ll give some examples shortly. Actors can be human like normal users, or automated like software.

Staleness refers to the fact that in a collaborative environment, once data has been shown to a user, that same data may have been changed by another actor – it is stale. Almost any system which makes use of a cache is serving stale data – often for performance reasons. What this means is that we cannot entirely trust our users decisions, as they could have been made based on out-of-date information.

Standard layered architectures don’t explicitly deal with either of these issues. While putting everything in the same database may be one step in the direction of handling collaboration, staleness is usually exacerbated in those architectures by the use of caches as a performance-improving afterthought.

A picture for reference

I’ve given some talks about CQRS using this diagram to explain it:

CQRS

The boxes named AC are Autonomous Components. We’ll describe what makes them autonomous when discussing commands. But before we go into the complicated parts, let’s start with queries:

Queries

If the data we’re going to be showing users is stale anyway, is it really necessary to go to the master database and get it from there? Why transform those 3rd normal form structures to domain objects if we just want data – not any rule-preserving behaviors? Why transform those domain objects to DTOs to transfer them across a wire, and who said that wire has to be exactly there? Why transform those DTOs to view model objects?

In short, it looks like we’re doing a heck of a lot of unnecessary work based on the assumption that reusing code that has already been written will be easier than just solving the problem at hand. Let’s try a different approach:

How about we create an additional data store whose data can be a bit out of sync with the master database – I mean, the data we’re showing the user is stale anyway, so why not reflect in the data store itself. We’ll come up with an approach later to keep this data store more or less in sync.

Now, what would be the correct structure for this data store? How about just like the view model? One table for each view. Then our client could simply SELECT * FROM MyViewTable (or possibly pass in an ID in a where clause), and bind the result to the screen. That would be just as simple as can be. You could wrap that up with a thin facade if you feel the need, or with stored procedures, or using AutoMapper which can simply map from a data reader to your view model class. The thing is that the view model structures are already wire-friendly, so you don’t need to transform them to anything else.

You could even consider taking that data store and putting it in your web tier. It’s just as secure as an in-memory cache in your web tier. Give your web servers SELECT only permissions on those tables and you should be fine.

Query Data Storage

While you can use a regular database as your query data store it isn’t the only option. Consider that the query schema is in essence identical to your view model. You don’t have any relationships between your various view model classes, so you shouldn’t need any relationships between the tables in the query data store.

So do you actually need a relational database?

The answer is no, but for all practical purposes and due to organizational inertia, it is probably your best choice (for now).

Scaling Queries

Since your queries are now being performed off of a separate data store than your master database, and there is no assumption that the data that’s being served is 100% up to date, you can easily add more instances of these stores without worrying that they don’t contain the exact same data. The same mechanism that updates one instance can be used for many instances, as we’ll see later.

This gives you cheap horizontal scaling for your queries. Also, since your not doing nearly as much transformation, the latency per query goes down as well. Simple code is fast code.

Data modifications

Since our users are making decisions based on stale data, we need to be more discerning about which things we let through. Here’s a scenario explaining why:

Let’s say we have a customer service representative who is one the phone with a customer. This user is looking at the customer’s details on the screen and wants to make them a ‘preferred’ customer, as well as modifying their address, changing their title from Ms to Mrs, changing their last name, and indicating that they’re now married. What the user doesn’t know is that after opening the screen, an event arrived from the billing department indicating that this same customer doesn’t pay their bills – they’re delinquent. At this point, our user submits their changes.

Should we accept their changes?

Well, we should accept some of them, but not the change to ‘preferred’, since the customer is delinquent. But writing those kinds of checks is a pain – we need to do a diff on the data, infer what the changes mean, which ones are related to each other (name change, title change) and which are separate, identify which data to check against – not just compared to the data the user retrieved, but compared to the current state in the database, and then reject or accept.

Unfortunately for our users, we tend to reject the whole thing if any part of it is off. At that point, our users have to refresh their screen to get the up-to-date data, and retype in all the previous changes, hoping that this time we won’t yell at them because of an optimistic concurrency conflict.

As we get larger entities with more fields on them, we also get more actors working with those same entities, and the higher the likelihood that something will touch some attribute of them at any given time, increasing the number of concurrency conflicts.

If only there was some way for our users to provide us with the right level of granularity and intent when modifying data. That’s what commands are all about.

Commands

A core element of CQRS is rethinking the design of the user interface to enable us to capture our users’ intent such that making a customer preferred is a different unit of work for the user than indicating that the customer has moved or that they’ve gotten married. Using an Excel-like UI for data changes doesn’t capture intent, as we saw above.

We could even consider allowing our users to submit a new command even before they’ve received confirmation on the previous one. We could have a little widget on the side showing the user their pending commands, checking them off asynchronously as we receive confirmation from the server, or marking them with an X if they fail. The user could then double-click that failed task to find information about what happened.

Note that the client sends commands to the server – it doesn’t publish them. Publishing is reserved for events which state a fact – that something has happened, and that the publisher has no concern about what receivers of that event do with it.

Commands and Validation

In thinking through what could make a command fail, one topic that comes up is validation. Validation is different from business rules in that it states a context-independent fact about a command. Either a command is valid, or it isn’t. Business rules on the other hand are context dependent.

In the example we saw before, the data our customer service rep submitted was valid, it was only due to the billing event arriving earlier which required the command to be rejected. Had that billing event not arrived, the data would have been accepted.

Even though a command may be valid, there still may be reasons to reject it.

As such, validation can be performed on the client, checking that all fields required for that command are there, number and date ranges are OK, that kind of thing. The server would still validate all commands that arrive, not trusting clients to do the validation.

Rethinking UIs and commands in light of validation

The client can make of the query data store when validating commands. For example, before submitting a command that the customer has moved, we can check that the street name exists in the query data store.

At that point, we may rethink the UI and have an auto-completing text box for the street name, thus ensuring that the street name we’ll pass in the command will be valid. But why not take things a step further? Why not pass in the street ID instead of its name? Have the command represent the street not as a string, but as an ID (int, guid, whatever).

On the server side, the only reason that such a command would fail would be due to concurrency – that someone had deleted that street and that that hadn’t been reflected in the query store yet; a fairly exceptional set of circumstances.

Reasons valid commands fail and what to do about it

So we’ve got a well-behaved client that is sending valid commands, yet the server still decides to reject them. Often the circumstances for the rejection are related to other actors changing state relevant to the processing of that command.

In the CRM example above, it is only because the billing event arrived first. But “first” could be a millisecond before our command. What if our user pressed the button a millisecond earlier? Should that actually change the business outcome? Shouldn’t we expect our system to behave the same when observed from the outside?

So, if the billing event arrived second, shouldn’t that revert preferred customers to regular ones? Not only that, but shouldn’t the customer be notified of this, like by sending them an email? In which case, why not have this be the behavior for the case where the billing event arrives first? And if we’ve already got a notification model set up, do we really need to return an error to the customer service rep? I mean, it’s not like they can do anything about it other than notifying the customer.

So, if we’re not returning errors to the client (who is already sending us valid commands), maybe all we need to do on the client when sending a command is to tell the user “thank you, you will receive confirmation via email shortly”. We don’t even need the UI widget showing pending commands.

Commands and Autonomy

What we see is that in this model, commands don’t need to be processed immediately – they can be queued. How fast they get processed is a question of Service-Level Agreement (SLA) and not architecturally significant. This is one of the things that makes that node that processes commands autonomous from a runtime perspective – we don’t require an always-on connection to the client.

Also, we shouldn’t need to access the query store to process commands – any state that is needed should be managed by the autonomous component – that’s part of the meaning of autonomy.

Another part is the issue of failed message processing due to the database being down or hitting a deadlock. There is no reason that such errors should be returned to the client – we can just rollback and try again. When an administrator brings the database back up, all the message waiting in the queue will then be processed successfully and our users receive confirmation.

The system as a whole is quite a bit more robust to any error conditions.

Also, since we don’t have queries going through this database any more, the database itself is able to keep more rows/pages in memory which serve commands, improving performance. When both commands and queries were being served off of the same tables, the database server was always juggling rows between the two.

Autonomous Components

While in the picture above we see all commands going to the same AC, we could logically have each command processed by a different AC, each with it’s own queue. That would give us visibility into which queue was the longest, letting us see very easily which part of the system was the bottleneck. While this is interesting for developers, it is critical for system administrators.

Since commands wait in queues, we can now add more processing nodes behind those queues (using the distributor with NServiceBus) so that we’re only scaling the part of the system that’s slow. No need to waste servers on any other requests.

Service Layers

Our command processing objects in the various autonomous components actually make up our service layer. The reason you don’t see this layer explicitly represented in CQRS is that it isn’t really there, at least not as an identifiable logical collection of related objects – here’s why:

In the layered architecture (AKA 3-Tier) approach, there is no statement about dependencies between objects within a layer, or rather it is implied to be allowed. However, when taking a command-oriented view on the service layer, what we see are objects handling different types of commands. Each command is independent of the other, so why should we allow the objects which handle them to depend on each other?

Dependencies are things which should be avoided, unless there is good reason for them.

Keeping the command handling objects independent of each other will allow us to more easily version our system, one command at a time, not needing even to bring down the entire system, given that the new version is backwards compatible with the previous one.

Therefore, keep each command handler in its own VS project, or possibly even in its own solution, thus guiding developers away from introducing dependencies in the name of reuse (it’s a fallacy). If you do decide as a deployment concern, that you want to put them all in the same process feeding off of the same queue, you can ILMerge those assemblies and host them together, but understand that you will be undoing much of the benefits of your autonomous components.

Whither the domain model?

Although in the diagram above you can see the domain model beside the command-processing autonomous components, it’s actually an implementation detail. There is nothing that states that all commands must be processed by the same domain model. Arguably, you could have some commands be processed by transaction script, others using table module (AKA active record), as well as those using the domain model. Event-sourcing is another possible implementation.

Another thing to understand about the domain model is that it now isn’t used to serve queries. So the question is, why do you need to have so many relationships between entities in your domain model?

(You may want to take a second to let that sink in.)

Do we really need a collection of orders on the customer entity? In what command would we need to navigate that collection? In fact, what kind of command would need any one-to-many relationship? And if that’s the case for one-to-many, many-to-many would definitely be out as well. I mean, most commands only contain one or two IDs in them anyway.

Any aggregate operations that may have been calculated by looping over child entities could be pre-calculated and stored as properties on the parent entity. Following this process across all the entities in our domain would result in isolated entities needing nothing more than a couple of properties for the IDs of their related entities – “children” holding the parent ID, like in databases.

In this form, commands could be entirely processed by a single entity – viola, an aggregate root that is a consistency boundary.

Persistence for command processing

Given that the database used for command processing is not used for querying, and that most (if not all) commands contain the IDs of the rows they’re going to affect, do we really need to have a column for every single domain object property? What if we just serialized the domain entity and put it into a single column, and had another column containing the ID? This sounds quite similar to key-value storage that is available in the various cloud providers. In which case, would you really need an object-relational mapper to persist to this kind of storage?

You could also pull out an additional property per piece of data where you’d want the “database” to enforce uniqueness.

I’m not suggesting that you do this in all cases – rather just trying to get you to rethink some basic assumptions.

Let me reiterate

How you process the commands is an implementation detail of CQRS.

Keeping the query store in sync

After the command-processing autonomous component has decided to accept a command, modifying its persistent store as needed, it publishes an event notifying the world about it. This event often is the “past tense” of the command submitted:

MakeCustomerPerferredCommand -> CustomerHasBeenMadePerferredEvent

The publishing of the event is done transactionally together with the processing of the command and the changes to its database. That way, any kind of failure on commit will result in the event not being sent. This is something that should be handled by default by your message bus, and if you’re using MSMQ as your underlying transport, requires the use of transactional queues.

The autonomous component which processes those events and updates the query data store is fairly simple, translating from the event structure to the persistent view model structure. I suggest having an event handler per view model class (AKA per table).

Here’s the picture of all the pieces again:

CQRS

Bounded Contexts

While CQRS touches on many pieces of software architecture, it is still not at the top of the food chain. CQRS if used is employed within a bounded context (DDD) or a business component (SOA) – a cohesive piece of the problem domain. The events published by one BC are subscribed to by other BCs, each updating their query and command data stores as needed.

UI’s from the CQRS found in each BC can be “mashed up” in a single application, providing users a single composite view on all parts of the problem domain. Composite UI frameworks are very useful for these cases.

Summary

CQRS is about coming up with an appropriate architecture for multi-user collaborative applications. It explicitly takes into account factors like data staleness and volatility and exploits those characteristics for creating simpler and more scalable constructs.

One cannot truly enjoy the benefits of CQRS without considering the user-interface, making it capture user intent explicitly. When taking into account client-side validation, command structures may be somewhat adjusted. Thinking through the order in which commands and events are processed can lead to notification patterns which make returning errors unnecessary.

While the result of applying CQRS to a given project is a more maintainable and performant code base, this simplicity and scalability require understanding the detailed business requirements and are not the result of any technical “best practice”. If anything, we can see a plethora of approaches to apparently similar problems being used together – data readers and domain models, one-way messaging and synchronous calls.

Although this blog post is over 3000 words (a record for this blog), I know that it doesn’t go into enough depth on the topic (it takes about 3 days out of the 5 of my Advanced Distributed Systems Design course to cover everything in enough depth). Still, I hope it has given you the understanding of why CQRS is the way it is and possibly opened your eyes to other ways of looking at the design of distributed systems.

Questions and comments are most welcome.



MySpace Architecture Considered Expensive

Friday, October 9th, 2009

I just finished listening to the Microsoft presentation on how they use the Concurrency & Coordination Runtime (CCR) in MySpace (the stated largest web site running .NET).

Some interesting numbers were stated in the talk.

  • Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of requests per second
  • Over 3 thousand web servers
  • Over a thousand mid-tier servers

No wonder most big web sites don’t run .NET. The Windows licenses would put them out of business.

Well, that is if you follow those same architectural practices.

I’ve written in the past of alternative architectural approaches that can scale to those levels at easily an order of magnitude less hardware (I think it’s closer to two OOMs) – here’s one of them on the topic of weather:

Building Super-Scalable Web Systems with REST.

By the way, the client quoted in that post is now well above 60 million users with only small incremental increases in hardware. Oh, and their running everything on Windows and .NET. The question is not “can it scale”, but rather “how much will it cost to scale”.

Architecture pays itself back faster than ever in the Web 2.0 world.



MSDN Magazine Smart Client Article

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

image

My article on “optimizing a large-scale Software+Services application” has been published in the April edition of MSDN Magazine.

Here’s a short excerpt:

“We had to juggle occasional connectivity, data synchronization, and publish/subscribe all at the same time. We learned that we couldn’t solve all problems either client-side or server-side, but rather that an integrated approach was needed since any changes on one side needed corresponding changes on the other side.”

Continue reading…



   


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Udi Dahan is the real deal.

We brought him on site to give our development staff the 5-day “Advanced Distributed System Design” training. The course profoundly changed our understanding and approach to SOA and distributed systems.

Consider some of the evidence: 1. Months later, developers still make allusions to concepts learned in the course nearly every day 2. One of our developers went home and made her husband (a developer at another company) sign up for the course at a subsequent date/venue 3. Based on what we learned, we’ve made constant improvements to our architecture that have helped us to adapt to our ever changing business domain at scale and speed If you have the opportunity to receive the training, you will make a substantial paradigm shift.

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“I attended both of Udi's "UI Composition Key to SOA Success" and "DDD in Enterprise Apps" sessions and they were exceptionally good. I will definitely participate in his sessions again. Udi is a great presenter and has the ability to explain complex issues in a manner that everyone understands.”

Eran Sagi, Software Architect at HP
“So far, I heard about Service Oriented architecture all over. Everyone mentions it – the big buzz word. But, when I actually asked someone for what does it really mean, no one managed to give me a complete satisfied answer. Finally in his excellent course “Advanced Distributed Systems”, I got the answers I was looking for. Udi went over the different motivations (principles) of Services Oriented, explained them well one by one, and showed how each one could be technically addressed using NService bus. In his course, Udi also explain the way of thinking when coming to design a Service Oriented system. What are the questions you need to ask yourself in order to shape your system, place the logic in the right places for best Service Oriented system.

I would recommend this course for any architect or developer who deals with distributed system, but not only. In my work we do not have a real distributed system, but one PC which host both the UI application and the different services inside, all communicating via WCF. I found that many of the architecture principles and motivations of SOA apply for our system as well. Enough that you have SW partitioned into components and most of the principles becomes relevant to you as well. Bottom line – an excellent course recommended to any SW Architect, or any developer dealing with distributed system.”

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