Azure - Send message to all other Roles and wait for response - azure

A really common pattern that I need in multi instance web applications is invalidating MemoryCaches over all instances - and waiting for a confirmation that this has been done. (Because a user might otherwise after a refresh suddenly see old data on another instance)
We can make this with a combination of:
AzureServicebus,
Sending message to a topic
other instances send message back with ReplyTo to the original instance
have a wait loop for waiting on the messages back,
be aware of how many other instances are there in the first place.
probably some timeout because what happens if an instance crashes in between?
I think working out all these little edge cases might be a lot of work - so before we reinvent the wheel - is there already a common pattern or library for this?
(of course one solution would be using a shared cache like Redis, but for some situations a memorycache is a lot faster)

Have a look at Azure Durable Functions, e.g. Fan-In/Fan-Out scenario. They use Azure Storage Queues underneath, but provide higher-level abstractions.
Note that Durable Functions are still in early preview (as of August 2017), so not suitable for production use yet.

I think working out all these little edge cases might be a lot of work - so before we reinvent the wheel - is there already a common pattern or library for this?
Indeed. This sounds like a candidate for a middleware framework such as NServiceBus or MassTransit.
AzureServicebus
Both NServiceBus and MassTransit support Azure Service Bus as the transport.
Sending message to a topic
Both NServiceBus and MassTransit can Publish messages (events) to topics.
other instances send message back with ReplyTo to the original instance
Both NServiceBus and MassTransit can send messages to specific destination. NServiceBus also can Reply to the originator of an incoming message using a request/reply pattern.
have a wait loop for waiting on the messages back
Both NServiceBus and MassTransit support Sagas, also known as Process Coordinator pattern.
be aware of how many other instances are there in the first place.
Not sure about this requirement. When you scale out, you're running with a competing consumer and shouldn't care about number of instances of an endpoint.
probably some timeout because what happens if an instance crashes in between?
If you refer to retries and recovery, then both NServiceBus and MassTransit support retries.

You can use Azure Redis cache pub/sub model to do this.
1) Subscribe to Redis multiplexer
connectionMultiplexer.GetSubscriber().Subscribe(
"SubscribeChannelName",
(channel, message) => {
invalidate cache here and publish the confirmation using below publish method
connectionMultiplexer.GetSubscriber().PublishAsync("PublishChannelName", "Cache invalidated for instance").Wait();
});
2) Publish the cache invalidation and subscribe for confirmation from instances
var connection = ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect("redis connection string");
var redisSubscriber = connection.GetSubscriber();
redisSubscriber.Subscribe(
"PublishChannelName",
(channel, message) => {
// write logic to verify if all instances notified about cache invalidation.
});
redisSubscriber.PublishAsync("SubscribeChannelName","invalidate cache")).Wait();

Related

Architecture issue - Azure servicebus and message order guarantee

Ok so i'm relatively new to the servicebus. Working on a project where we use Azure servicebus for queueing messages. Our architecture roughly looks like the following:
So the idea is that in our SourceSystem all kinds of stuff happens, which leads to messages being put on the servicebustopics. Now our responsibility is syncing these events to the external client so they are aware of what we are doing.
Now the issue is that currently we dont use servicebus sessions so message order isnt guaranteed. Also consider the following scenario:
OrderCreated
OrderUpdate 1
OrderUpdate 2
OrderClosed
What happens now is if the externalclients API is down for say OrderUpdate 1 and OrderUpdate 2, we could potentially send the messages in order: OrderCreated, OrderClosed, OrderUpdate 1, OrderUpdate 2.
Currently we just retry a message a few times and then it moves into the deadletter queue for manual reprocessing.
What steps should we take to better guarantee message order? I feel like in the scope of an order, message order needs to be guaranteed.
Should we force the sourcesystem to put all messages for a order in a servicebus session? But how can we handle this with multiple topics? And what do we do if message 1 from a session ends up in the deadletter?
There are a lot of considerations here, should we use a single topic so its easier to manage the sessions? But this opens up other problems with different message structures being in a single topic?
Id love to hear your opinions on this
Have a look at Durable Functions in Azure. You can use the 'Async Http API' or one of the other patterns to achieve the orchestration you need to do.
NServicebus' Sagas might also be a good option, here is an article that does a very good comparison between NServicebus and Durable Functions.
If the external client has to receive all those events and order matters, sending those messages to multiple topics where a topic is per message type will make your mission extremely hard to accomplish. For ordered messaging first you need to use a single entity (queue or topic) with Sessions enabled. That way you can guarantee ordered message processing. In case you have multiple external clients, you'd need to have a session-enabled entity (topic) per external client.
Another option is to implement a pattern known as Process Manager. The process manager would be responsible to make the decisions about the incoming messages and conclude when the work for a given order is completed or not.
There are also libraries (MassTransit, NServiceBus, etc) that can help you. NServiceBus implements Process Manager via a feature called Saga (tutorial) and MassTransit has it as well (documentation).

Node.js application acting as producer and consumer

I am now working on the application saving data into the database using the REST API. The basic flow is: REST API -> object -> save to database. I wanted to introduce the queue to the application, having in mind the idea of the producer and consumer being a part of one, abovementioned application.
Is it possible for the Node.js application to act as both producer and consumer of the queue? Knowing that Node.js is single-threaded language, does it give me any other choice instead of creating two applications - one producing to the queue and the second one - waiting actively for messages in a queue and saving to the database?
Also, the requirement here would be for an application to process any item that hasn't been acknowledged on the queue on the restart. That also makes me think that the 'two applications' architecture is the best idea here.
Thank you for the help.
Yes, nodejs is able to do that and is well suited for every I/O intensive application use case. The point here is "what are you trying to achieve"? message queues are meant to make different applications communicate together, while if you need an in-process event bus is a total overkill. There are many easier and efficient ways to propagate messages between decoupled components of the same nodejs app; one of these way is EventEmitter that let your components collaborate in a pubsub fashion
If you are convinced that an AMQP broker is you solution, you just need to
Define a "producer" class that publishes data on an exchange myExchange
Define a "consumer" queue that declares a queue myQueue
Create a binding at application startup between myExchange and myQueue, based on some routing key. Then, when a message is received from "consumer" you need to acknowledge after db saving. When a message is acked, it will be destroyed since it's already been consumed. You can decide, after an error, to recover the message via NACK
There are nodejs libraries that make code easier, such as Rascal
Short answer: YES and use two separate connections for publishing and consuming
Is it possible for the NodeJS application to act as both producer and consumer of the queue?
I would even state that it is a good usecase matching extremely well with NodeJS philosophy and threading mechanism.
Knowing that Node.js is single-threaded language, does it give me any other choice instead of creating two applications - one producing to the queue and the second one - waiting actively for messages in a queue and saving to the database?
You can have one application handling both, just be aware that if your client is publish too fast for the server to handle, RabbitMQ can apply back pressure on the TCP connection, thus consuming on a back-pressured TCP connection would greatly affect consumer performance.

How to handle publishing event when message broker is out?

I'm thinking how can I handle sending events when suddenly message broker go down. Please take a look at this code
using (var uow = uowProvider.Create())
{
...
...
var policy = offer.Buy(customer);
uow.Policies.Add(policy);
// DB changes are saved here! but what would happen if...
await uow.CommitChanges();
// ...eventPublisher throw an exception?
await eventPublisher.PublishMessage(PolicyCreated(policy));
return true;
}
IMHO if eventPublisher throw exception the event PolicyCreated won't be published. I don't know how to deal with this situation. The event must be published in system. I suppose that only good solution will be creating some kind of retry mechanism but I'm not sure...
I would like to elaborate a bit on the answers provided by both #Imran Arshad and #VoiceOfUnreason which are, of course, correct.
There are basically 3 patterns when it comes to publishing messages:
exactly once delivery (requires distributed transactions)
at most once delivery (no distributed transaction but may miss messages - like the actor model)
at least once delivery (no distributed transaction but may have duplicate messages)
The following is all in terms of your example.
For exactly once delivery both the database and the queue would need to provide the ability to enlist in distributed transactions. Some queues do not proivde this functionality out-of-the-box (like RabbitMQ) and even though it may be possible to roll your own it may not be the best option. Distributed transactions are typically quite slow.
For at most once delivery we have to accept that we may miss messages and I'm guessing that in most use-cases this is quite troublesome. You would get around this by tracking the progress and picking up the missed messages and resending them if required.
For at least once delivery we would need to ensure that the messages are idempotent. When we get a duplicate messages (usually quite an edge case) they should be ignored or their outcome should be the same as the initial message processed.
Now, there are a couple of ways around your issue. You could start a database transaction and make your database changes. Before you comit you perform the message sending. Should that fail then your transaction would be rolled back. That works fine for sending a single message but in your case some subscribers may have received a message. This complicates matters as all your subscribers need to receive the message or none of them get to receive it.
You could have your subscriber check whether the state is indeed true and whether it should continue processing. This places a burden on the subscriber and introduces some coupling. It could either postpone the action should the state not allow processing, or ignore it.
Another option is that instead of publishing the event you send yourself a command that indicates completion of the step. The command handler would perform the publishing and retry until all subscriber queues receive the message. This would require the relevant subscribers to ignore those messages that they had already processed (idempotence).
The outbox is a store-and-forward approach and will eventually send the message to all subscribers. You could have your outbox perhaps be included in the database transaction. In my Shuttle.Esb service bus one of the folks that used it came across a weird side-effect that I had not planned. He used a sql-based queue as an outbox and the queue connection was to the same database. It was therefore included in the database transasction and would roll back with all the other changes if not committed. Apologies for promoting my own product but I'm sure other service bus offerings may have the same functionality.
There are therefore quite a few things to consider and various techniques to mitigate the risk of a queue outage. I would, however, move the queue interaction to before the database commit.
For reliable system you need to save events locally. If your broker is down you have to retry and publish event.
There are many ways to achieve this but most common is outbox pattern. Just like your mail box your event/message stays locally and you keep retrying until it's sent and you mark the message published in your local DB.
you can read more about here Publish Events
You'll want to review Udi Dahan's discussion of Reliable Messaging without Distributed Transactions.
But very roughly, the PolicyCreated event becomes part of the unit of work; either because it is saved in the Policy representation itself, or because it is saved in an EventRepository that participates in the same transaction as the Policies repository.
Once you've captured the information in your database, retry the publish is relatively straight forward - read the events from the database, publish, optionally mark the events in the database as successfully published so that they can be cleaned up.

C# Masstransit how to handle exception when the queue is not available or down

I am using Masstransit with RabbitMQ to consume message from queue. Can anyone tell me how to handle exception when the queue is down or not available to get the message? following is my setup:
var busControl = Bus.Factory.CreateUsingRabbitMq(cfg =>
{
var host = cfg.Host(new Uri(configManager.RabbitMqUrl), h =>
{
h.Username(configManager.RabbitMqUserName);
h.Password(configManager.RabbitMqPassword);
});
cfg.ReceiveEndpoint(host, RabbitMqConstants.Change, e =>
{
e.UseRetry(Retry.Immediate(configManager.ProcessorRetryNumber));
e.Handler<ChangeDetected>(context =>
{
var task = Task.Run(() => consumer.Consume(context));
return task;
});
});
});
Thanks
In our in-house RabbitMQ messaging implementation, we have approached/solved the publishing side of this (broker not available when want to publish) in two ways:
[1] We use Polly to asynchronously orchestrate a limited number of publishing retries (with delay between tries). This overcomes situations where loss of connectivity to the broker is a minor network blip.
[2] If all publish retries fail, we use a 'message hospital' concept: we store enough detail about the failed-to-publish message to an alternative source (database; with additional failover to local file store), such that we can republish the failed messages later, if desired. A variant on 'store and forward' (we can republish in bulk, but we also allow manual intervention to choose whether to republish).
All depends how important it is to you 'never to lose a message'. Some redundancy of RabbitMQ brokers (clustering as Chris Patterson suggests or federation) is also an obvious step. Clustering/federation gives you protection if you lose/want to do maintenance on one/some of your brokers. The resilience strategies [1], [2] above give you protection if for some reason the message publisher can't see any RabbitMQ broker (for example network fault nearer the publisher).
For receiving messages, MassTransit will automatically reconnect to the broker (RabbitMQ) when it comes back online. For sending messages, if your application is unable to connect to the broker to send, that's another problem entirely.
When using messaging in applications, it often becomes the single most important aspect of your infrastructure. So if you need high availability, then a cluster setup may be in your future (there are articles on clustering RabbitMQ out there).
MassTransit does not have any store-and-forward concepts in it, the broker needs to be available. While a few options have been discussed, nothing is concrete at this point nor generally available.
After reading its documents, I realized that MassTransit just does not handle situations that the producer failed to send/publish to MQ or the consumer failed to send back the ACK.
So I have to go with another tool CAP, which implemented a local transaction table. You can put the send message action within the same local DB transaction of your business code. But the cons is that the CAP does not have saga implemented yet.
Otherwise, you have to implement a durable outbox pattern with the local transaction table by yourself.

Detect and Delete Orphaned Queues, Topics, or Subscriptions on Azure Service Bus

If there are no longer any publishers or subscribers reading nor writing to a Queue, Topic, or Subscription, because of crashes or other abnormal terminations (instance restart, etc.), is that Queue/Topic/Subscription effectively orphaned?
I tested this by creating a few Queues, and then terminating the applications. Those Queues were still on the Service Bus a long time later. It seems that they will just stay there forever. That would be wonderful if we WANTED that behavior, but in this case, we do not.
How can we detect and delete these Queues, Topics, and Subscriptions? They will count towards Azure limits, etc, and we cannot have these orphaned processes every time an instance is restarted/patched/crashes.
If it helps make the question clearer, this is a unique situation in which the Queues/Topics/Subscriptions have special names, or special Filters, and a very limited set of publishers (1) and subscribers (1) for a limited time. This is not a case where we want survivability. These are instance-specific response channels. Whether we use Queues or Subscriptions is immaterial. If the instance is gone, so is the need for that Queue (or Subscription).
This is part of a solution where each web role has a dedicated response channel that it monitors. At any time, this web role may have dozens of requests pending via other messaging channels (Queues/Topics), and it is waiting for the answers on multiple threads. We need the response to come back to the thread that placed the message, so that the web role can respond to the caller. It is no good in this situation to simply have a Subscription based on the machine, because it will be receiving messages for other threads. We need each publishing thread to establish a dedicated response channel, so that the only thing on that channel is the response for that thread.
Even if we use Subscriptions (with some kind of instance-related filter) to do a long-polling receive operation on the Subscription, if the web role instance dies, that Subscription will be orphaned, correct?
This question can be boiled down like so:
If there are no more publishers or subscribers to a Queue/Topic/Subscription, then that service is effectively orphaned. How can those orphans be detected and cleaned up?
In this scenario you are looking for the Queue/Subscriptions to be "dynamic" in nature. They would be created and removed based on use as opposed to the current explicit provisioning model for these entities. Service Bus provides you with the APIs to perform create/delete operations so you can plug these on role OnStart/OnStop events appropriately. If those operations fail for some reason then the orphaned entities will exist. Again you can run clean up operation on them based on some unique identifier for the name of the entities. An example of this can be seen here: http://windowsazurecat.com/2011/08/how-to-simplify-scale-inter-role-communication-using-windows-azure-service-bus/
In the near future we will add more metadata and query capabilities to Queues/Topics/Subscriptions so you can see when they were last accessed and make cleanup decisions.
Service Bus Queues are built using the “brokered messaging” infrastructure designed to integrate applications or application components that may span multiple communication protocols, data contracts, trust domains, and/or network environments. The allows for a mechanism to communicate reliably with durable messaging.
If a client (publisher) sends a message to a service bus queue and then crashes the message will be stored on the Queue until as consumer reads the message off the queue. Also if your consumer dies and restarts it will just poll the queue and pick up any work that is waiting for it (You can scale out and have multiple consumers reading from queue to increase throughput), Service Bus Queues allow you to decouple your applications via durable cloud gateway analogous to MSMQ on-premises (or other queuing technology).
What I'm really trying to say is that you won't get an orphaned queue, you might get poisoned messages that you will need to handled, this blog post gives some very detailed information re: Service Bus Queues and their Capacity and Quotas which might give you a better understanding http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh767287.aspx
Re: Queue Management, you can do this via Visual Studio (1.7 SDK & Tools) or there is an excellent tool called Service Bus Explorer that will make your life easier for queue managagment: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Service-Bus-Explorer-f2abca5a
*Note the default maximum number of queues is 10,000 (per service namespace, this can be increased via a support call)
As Abhishek Lai mentioned there is no orphan detecting capability supported.
Orphan detection can be implement externally in multiple ways.
For example, whenever you send/receive a message, update a timestamp in an SQL database to indicate that the queue/tropic/subscription is still active. This timestamp can then be used to determine orphans.
If your process will crash which is very much possible there will be issue with the message delivery within the queue however queue will still be available to process your request. Handling Application Crashes and Unreadable Messages with Windows Azure Service Bus queues are described here:
The Service Bus provides functionality to help you gracefully recover from errors in your application or difficulties processing a message. If a receiver application is unable to process the message for some reason, then it can call the Abandon method on the received message (instead of the Complete method). This will cause the Service Bus to unlock the message within the queue and make it available to be received again, either by the same consuming application or by another consuming application.
In the event that the application crashes after processing the message but before the Complete request is issued, then the message will be redelivered to the application when it restarts. This is often called At Least Once Processing, that is, each message will be processed at least once but in certain situations the same message may be redelivered. If the scenario cannot tolerate duplicate processing, then application developers should add additional logic to their application to handle duplicate message delivery. This is often achieved using the MessageId property of the message, which will remain constant across delivery attempts.
If there are no longer any processes reading nor writing to a queue, because of crashes or other abnormal terminations (instance restart, etc.), is that queue effectively orphaned?
No the queue is in place to allow communication to occur via Brokered Messages, if all your apps die for some reason then the queue still exists and will be there when they become alive again, it's the communication channel for loosely decoupled applications. Regards Billing 'Messages are charged based on the number of messages sent to, or delivered by, the Service Bus during the billing month' you won't be charged if a queue exists but nobody is using it.
I tested this by creating a few queues, and then terminating the
applications. Those queues were still on the machine a long time
later.
The whole point of the queue is to guarantee message delivery of loosely decoupled applications. Think of the queue as an entity or application in its own right with high availability (SLA) as its hosted in Azure, your producer/consumers can die/restart and the queue will be active in Azure. *Note I got a bit confused with your wording re: "still on the machine a long time later", the queue doesn't actually live on your machine, it sits up in Azure in a designated service bus namespace. You can view and managed the queues via the tools I pointed out in the previous answer.
How can we detect and delete these queues, as they will count towards
Azure limits, etc.
As stated above the default maximum number of queues is 10,000 (per service namespace, this can be increased via a support call), queue management can be done via the tools stated in the other answer. You should only be looking to delete queue's when you no longer have producer/consumers looking to write to them (i.e. never again). You can of course create and delete queues in your producer/consumer applications via the namespaceManager.QueueExists, more information here How to Use Service Bus Queues
If it helps make the question clearer, this is a unique situation in which the queues have special names, and a very limited set of publishers (1) and subscribers (1) for a limited time.
It sounds like you need to use Topics & Subscriptions How to Use Service Bus Topics/Subscriptions, this link also has a section on 'How to Delete Topics and Subscriptions' If you have a very limited lifetime then you could handle topic creation/deletion in your app's otherwise you could have have a separate Queue/Topic/Subscription setup/deletion script to handle this logic...

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