Often we use some kind of „clustered“ environment to run our software.
This promises higher performance and better availability.
And the frameworks seem to suggest that it is just a matter of starting it twice and it will magically work correctly.
There is nothing wrong with investing some thoughts on this issue. It can actually quite wrong otherwise…
So some questions to think about:
Where are the data? Does each service have its own set of data? Or do they share the data? Or is there some kind of synchronization mechanism between the copies of data? Or is some data shared and some data as copy for each instance of the service?
Do we gain anything in terms of performance or is the additional power of the second instance eaten up by the overhead of synchronizing data? Or if data is only stored once, does this become the bottleneck?
Then there is an issue with sending the requests to the right service. Usually it is a good idea to use something like „sticky sessions“ to keep a whole session or collections of related requests on one instance. Even if the protocol is „stateless“ and „restful“.
Is there some magic caching that happens automatically, for example in persistence frameworks like Hibernate? What does this mean when running two instances? Do we really understand what is happening? Or do we trust that hibernate does it correctly anyway? I would not trust hibernate (or any other JPA implementation) on this issue.
What about transactions? If storage is not centralized, we might need to do distributed transactions. What does that mean?
Now messaging can become fun. Modern microservice architectures favor asynchronous communication over synchronous communication, where it can be applied. That means some kind of messaging or transmission of „events“ or whatever it is called. Now events can be subscribed. Do we want them to be processed exactly once, at least once or by every instance? How do we make sure it is happening as we need it? Especially the „exactly once“-case is tricky, but of course it can be done.
How do we handle tasks that run like once in a certain period of time, like cronjobs in Linux? Do we need to enforce that they run exactly once or is it ok to run them on each instance? If so, is it ok to run them at the same time?
Do we run the service multiple times on the productive system, but only a single instance on the test and development systems?
Running the service twice or more times is of course something we need to do quite often and it will become more common. But it is not necessarily easy. Some thinking needs to be done. Some questions need to be asked. And we need to find answwers to them. Consider this as a starting point for your own thinking processes for your specific application landscape. Get the knowledge, if it is not yet in the team by learning or by involving specialists who have experience…
