3 posts tagged with "microservices"

Functional Programming Isn't Just for Academics — Part 17

You send a command to unlock a door; not a metaphor, an actual lock, on an actual door, opened over the network because a tenant is standing outside it and your service has decided to let them in. The command goes out. Somewhere between your server and the lock a packet is lost — not the command, the acknowledgment. The lock opened. The confirmation never came back. From where your code stands, the operation has no result. The safest-looking move, the one every retry policy in the world will make, is to send the command again.

Whether that second command is harmless or a small disaster was decided long ago, not by the network, but by whoever modeled the operation. And the same question hides inside far more than the state of a lock. Provision a server, and a lost reply means you pay for two. Issue a customer the license they bought, dispatch a shipment, send a notification, publish a post, grant a permission… Every one is the same operation: an effect that leaves your control and cannot be pulled back, reached across a channel that can lose the receipt.

If your commerce platform drives critical revenue and the services it provides are difficult to predict in nature or scale — or if optimizing user experience depends on near-real-time responses to changing signals — reactive commerce warrants attention. Reactive commerce orchestrates digital discovery, selling, purchasing, and merchandising while adhering to the Reactive Manifesto's principles.

I'm a big fan of service oriented front-end design and microservice based architectures. If I were building a new service to take to market, I'd most likely go that way. Certainly, I would design it cloud native and my MVP would be API-first… After all, why would I invest the effort of building a slick UI when everyone is so gaga to go headless? But, as a purveyor of digital commerce, would I redeploy my front-end to take advantage of headless design or rearchitect my back-end to leverage all the advantages of a microservice architecture? Probably not.