Month: July 2015

Feature oriented design got wrong

Szymon Kulec 'Scooletz' Architecture, Design , , ,

The fourth link in my google search for ‘feature toggle’ is a link to this Building Real Software post. It’s about not about feature toggles described by Martin Folwer. It’s about feature toggles got wrong.

If you consider toggling features with flags and apply it literally, what you get is a lot of branching. That’s all. Some tests should be written twice to handle a positive and a negative scenario for the branch. The reason for this is a design not prepared to handle toggling properly. In the majority of cases, it’s a design which is not feature-based on its own.

The featured based design is created on the basis of closed components, which handle the given domain aspect. Some of them may be big like ‘basket’, some may be much smaller, like ‘notifications’ reacting to various changes and displaying needed information. The important thing is to design the features as closed components. Once you have it done this way, it’s easier to think about the page without notifications or ads. Again, disabling the feature is not a mere flag thrown in different pieces of code. It’s disabling or replacing the whole feature.

One of my favorite architecture styles, event driven architecture helps in a great manner to build this kind of toggles. It’s quite easy to simply… not handle the event at all. If you consider the notifications, if they are disabled, they simply do not react to various events like ‘order-processed’, etc. The separate story is to not create cycles of dependencies, but still, if you consider the reactive nature of connections between features, that’s a great enabler for introducing toggling with all of advantages one can derive from it with A/B tests, canary releases in mind.

I’m not a fan boy of feature toggling, I consider it as an important tool in architects arsenal though.

 

The cost of scan queries in Azure Table Storage

Szymon Kulec 'Scooletz' Azure, Azure , , ,

There are multiple articles describing the performance of Azure Table Storage. You probably read the entry of Troy Hunt, Working with 154 million records on Azure Table Storage…. You may have invested your time in reading How to get most out of Windows Azure Tables as well. My question is have you really considered the limitations of the queries, specifically scan queries and how they can consume the major part of Azure Performance Targets.

The PartitionKey and RowKey create the primary and the only index in ATS (Azure Table Storage). Depending on the query the following kinds can be distinguished:

  1. Point Queries, which are queries to retrieve a single entity by specifying a single PartitionKey and RowKey using equality as predicate
  2. Row Range Queries, which  are queries to get a set of entities defined with the same PartitionKey and a range of RowKeys
  3. Partition Range Queries, which are run with a range of ParitionKeys
  4. Full table scans, which have no predicate for ParitionKey

What are the costs and limitations of the following queries? Unfortunately, every row that is accessed by the query to perform scan over will be counted as the table operation, Tthere ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. This means, that if you scan your entire table (4th scenario), you’ll be able to process no more than 20,000 entities per second. This limits the usage of large data sets’ scans. If you have to model queries across different keys, then you may consider storing the same value twice: once under the natural Parition/RowKey pair and the second time to match the other index, to create an inverted index. If any case, you’ll have to scan through the entire data set, then using ATS is not the way to go, and you should consider some other ways of modelling your data, like asynchronous copy data to blob, etc.

Lokad.CQRS Retrospective

Szymon Kulec 'Scooletz' Architecture, DDD , , , ,

In the recent post Rinat Abdullin provides a retrospective for Lokad.CQRS framework which was/is a starting point for many CQRS journeys. It’s worth to mention that Rinat is the author of this library. The whole article may sound a bit harsh, it provides a great retrospection from the author’s and user’s point of view though.

I agree with the majority points of this post. The library provided abstractions allowing to change the storage engine, but the directions taken were very limiting. The tooling for messages, ddd console, was the thing at the beginning, but after spending a few days with it, I didn’t use it anyway. The library encouraged to use one-way messaging all the way down, to separate every piece. Today, when CQRS mailing lists are filled with messages like ‘you don’t have to use queues all the time’ and CQRS people are much more aware of the ability to handle the requests synchronously it’d be easier to give some directions.

The author finishes with

So, Lokad.CQRS was a big mistake of mine. I’m really sorry if you were affected by it in a bad way.

Hopefully, this recollection of my mistakes either provided you with some insights or simply entertained.

which I totally disagree with! Lokad.CQRS was the tool that shaped thinking of many people, when nothing like that was available on the market. Personally, it helped me to build a event-driven project (you can see the presentation about this here) based on somehow on Lokad.CQRS but with other abstractions and targeted at very good performance, not to mention living documentation built with Mono.Cecil.

Summary

Lokad.CQRS was a ground breaking library providing a bit too much tooling and abstracting too many things. I’m really glad if it helped you to learn about CQRS as it helped me.  Without this, I wouldn’t ask all the questions and wouldn’t learn so much.

The provided retrospective is invaluable and brings a lot of insights. I’m wishing you all to make that kind of ground breaking mistakes someday.