A global source of truth for the microservices generation

Description

One of the biggest challenges for today’s microservice generation is data, which gets split into fragments that are spread across a company, making it hard to get a joined-up view. One solution is to have a single, shared database that all services can access, but sharing databases across different services is a well-known anti-pattern. What if instead you shared a replayable commit log? This is the basic notion behind one of the most interesting and provocative ideas to arise from the stream-processing community.

Ben Stopford explains how an event stream—stored in a replayable log—can be used as a source of truth, incorporating the retentive properties of a database in a system designed to share data across many teams, cloud providers, or geographies. This leads to the idea of a database turned inside out: a central commit log spawning many continuously updated caches and views, embedded in different microservices. Ben examines the subtler, systemic effects that the pattern leads to—better autonomy, easier evolution and a more ephemeral approach to data—and explores the use of logs that span geographical regions and cloud providers. Along the way, he reflects on the practicalities of using logs as a distributed storage system and looks at some of the real-world applications of this approach.