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State Messaging (Karmarkar)

How can a service remain stateless while participating in stateful interactions?

State Messaging

Problem

When services are required to maintain state information in memory between message exchanges with consumers, their scalability can be comprised, and they can become a performance burden on the surrounding infrastructure.

Solution

Instead of retaining the state data in memory, its storage is temporarily delegated to messages.

Application

Depending on how this pattern is applied, both services and consumers may need to be designed to process message-based state data.

Impacts

This pattern may not be suitable for all forms of state data, and should messages be lost, any state information they carried may be lost as well.

Architecture

Composition, Service

State Messaging: Service A, acting as a service consumer, issues Request Message X to Service B (1). Service B creates the necessary data structures to maintain the necessary state and updates the data structures after processing this message. Service B then adds the state data to Response Message X, which it then returns back to Service A (2). Service A processes the response and then generates Request Message Y containing updated state data, which is then received and processed by Service B (3).

Service A, acting as a service consumer, issues Request Message X to Service B (1). Service B creates the necessary data structures to maintain the necessary state and updates the data structures after processing this message. Service B then adds the state data to Response Message X, which it then returns back to Service A (2). Service A processes the response and then generates Request Message Y containing updated state data, which is then received and processed by Service B (3).


SOA Design Patterns

This page contains excerpts from:

SOA Design Patterns by Thomas Erl

(ISBN: 0136135161, Hardcover, Full-Color, 400+ Illustrations, 865 pages)

For more information about this book, visit www.arcitura.com/books.