In today’s world, we are always striving for building applications which can adapt to constantly changing needs. We want our systems to flexible, resilient, scalable and withstand end user’s high expectations.
Considering these needs, a Reactive Manifesto was put together, with best practices which will help us build robust applications. Following four pillars makes a strong base of reactive application.
1. Responsive
2. Resilient
3. Elastic
4. Message Driven
You can see none of these concepts are new in nature, and you might be already implementing them in the applications you build. Reactive Manifesto brings them under one umbrella and emphasizes their importance. Let’s take a look at these pillars one by one and see what all well-known patterns we can use to implement each of them.
Responsive: An application is responsive if it responds to the user in a timely manner. A very simple example is you clicked on a button or link in a web application, it does not give you a feedback that button was clicked and the action gets completed after few seconds. Such an application is non-responsive as the user is left guessing if he is performing the right action.
Some of the well-known practices and design patterns which help us make sure if the application is responsive
– Asynchronous communication
– Caching
– Fanout and quickest reply pattern
– Fail-fast pattern
Resilience: An application is called resilient if it can handle failure conditions in a graceful manner.
Some of the patterns that help maintain resilience
– Circuit breaker pattern
– Failure handling pattern
– Bounded Queue Pattern
– Bulkhead Pattern
Elasticity: An application is called elastic if it can stand increase or decrease in load without any major impact on overall working and performance.
Some of the practices and patterns to implement elasticity
– Single responsibility
– Statelessness
– Autoscaling
– Self-containment
Message Driven: An application which uses message driven communication makes sure we are implementing various components and services in a loosely coupled manner. This helps us keep our components scalable and makes failure handling easy.
Practices used to implement Message driven communicaiton
– Event driven
– Publisher Subscriber pattern
– Idempotency pattern
I have covered some of these patterns in details in my book on Design Patterns and Best Practices.