Tag Archives: Design

Building Reactive Systems

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.

Design before you code

Somehow, with the penetration of agile development practices, I have been observing that less and less time is spent on designing the solution. Engineers treat Agile as a license to develop without design.

What is the problem with developing without designing or architecting the system first? I still remember when I was in college, my professor drew a parallel between architecting a building and architecting a software. Would you start building a house without thinking about design? you will not just start placing bricks without considering how many rooms you need? Where all these rooms go? How large should be every room? Where will the kitchen and bathroom be? Where all the wiring and plumbing will go? You will come up with the design, put in on a paper or a software and then calculate the feasibility.

Think of the complications that can happen if you build your house without thinking about design first. One room might be so big that there is very little space for the others. Or you are not left with any space to create a bathroom. These mistakes are costly. And that brings me to the other important factor which is causes ignoring of design in software. The manager thinks that change at a later state is going to be easy. At the end it is code, we can just change it. Well, changing the code is definitely possible, but never easy or cheap. It comes with its own cost.

More than often, where developers need to make changes at a later stage, they would be more inclined to apply quick fixes or hacks rather than making a bigger correct change. Of course, you have a tried and tested code in hand, why would you make too many changes to it, even if you know that is the right thing. And then there is developer ego, I mean, let’s admit it, it is not easy to accept one’s fault, especially if that means you would need to put in extra hours to fix that. More than ego, it is actually denial at times. People would try to stick to the solution they developed initially even though it is realized at a later stage that there could have been a better solution. Reason being, you have already invested too much.

This situation can be avoided if we think about design first. We can make sure our design covers all the possible requirements. It will not be possible to anticipate all the changes that are going to come at a later stage, but we can try to keep our design flexible. The idea is, set the ground rules, understand what all component and services we are required to create? What all data needs to be persisted and how are we going to do that? How security and error handling will be done? We need not get into implementation details, but the high-level design is a good start. We can fill in the details as and when requirements are clearer and we start actual work on the given piece of requirement.

In the end, all I would like to highlight is, if you think you are saving time by not thinking about the design of the application before you start to code, you are going to end up spending more time applying patches and fixes at the end.

Technology Agnostic Design

When developing high level design for a solution, it is not a good idea to think about technology choices. We need to keep a gap between design and implementation.

You should not finalize at this point if the solution is going to be build in Java, Python, NodeJS or PHP at this time. For example, you just define that there will be a employee service to provide employee data, but which language will be used to build it, is not part of high level design.

You should take a call what kind of database is well suited, will it be a RDBMS or a document based database, but we should not take a decision which specific vendor’s database we are going to use at this point. For example, we will take a call that we will use RDBMS, but will it be Oracle, mySQL, postgres or some other vendor provided DB, we will decide when we will think about implementation details.

Similarly, all your vendor and technology decisions will not be part of high level design. The details should be filled at a later point, once you have finalized your high level design and made sure you have all the components, services and communications identified.

Why should we not think about technology choices while building high level design? Because it limits our design and solution. Because strengths and weaknesses of a technology becomes strength and weakness of our solution. Because strengths and weaknesses of technologies change over time, hence our architecture should be independent of that.

Once you bring in vendor and technology at a high level design, you commit too much to that. For example say XYZ RDBMS provider is currently the best in market as they provide fastest operations. You design your architecture around that, you use vendor specific data structures and data types. In future, if there is a vendor providing similar services at a cheaper price, we will figure out making a change is very costly as we have to change too much of code. If we would have thought of RDBMS as just a plug and play provide, we could have made this change easily. Infact, keeping our architecture technology agnostic will force us to think beyond a vendor. We will need to think ways of improving our database performance, think of better indexing, sharding, caching, making our architecture robust and independent of technology and vendors.

https://bigmedium.com/ideas/links/managing-technology-agnostic-design-systems.html

https://www.infoq.com/news/2007/09/technology-agnostic-soa

http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/managing-technology-agnostic-design-systems/

SOLID Principles for object oriented design

There are many best practices and principles figured out by developers and architects for object oriented design. Robert Martin has intelligently put a subset of these good practices together, and gave them acronym SOLID which helps easy remembrance.

Single responsibility principle: A class should handle only one single responsibility and have only one reason for change. For example a class “Employee” should not change if there a change in project or some reporting details.

Open Closed principle: Code should be open for extension but closed for modification. If you want to add a new type of report in the system, you should not be changing any existing code. More here

Liskov substitution principle: “objects in a program should be replaceable with instances of their subtypes without altering the correctness of that program.” So if we have Employee class, which is extended by Manager. We should be able to use Manager instead of Employee and all the Employee methods like calculate Salary, generate annual report etc should work without any issues. Say if there is an object like “ContractWorker” that does not support a few functions of Employee like annual report, one should be careful not to make it subtype of Employee.

Interface Segregation principle: “no client should be forced to depend on methods it does not use”. Coming back to previous example, if “ContractWorker” does not need to support annual report, we should not force it to implement an iEmployee interface. We should break the interfaces say iReport and iEmployee, iEmployee can extent iReport and iContractWorker should implement only iReport. iReport can further be divided into reporting types if required.

Dependency Inversion principle: This one seems to be one of my favorite as I have written about it here, here, here and here. This one indeed is one of the most important design patterns which can be followed to make the code loosely coupled and hence making it more maintainable (golden rule- low coupling + high cohesiveness). In traditional programming, when a high level method calls a low level method, it needs to be aware of the low level method at compile time, whereas using DI we can make high level method depend on an abstraction or interface and details of implementation will be provided at run time, hence giving us freedom to use which implementation to be used. Coming back to my previous example, I can have multiple implementations of Employee Reporting, iReport. Some implementation need and excel report, other might need a PDF reporting, which can be decided at runtime.

Generating ER diagram from database -2

Sometime back I wrote about DBvisualizer to generate schema ER design from database.

Here is another way by using schemaspy.

http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/

This is a simple java based tool/ jar file. As per example given in link above, all you need to run the jar file providing database access details. 

java -jar schemaSpy.jar -t dbType -db dbName [-s schema] -u user [-p password] -o outputDir

You might want to give database drivers jar file path. For example, for Postgres 

java -jar /home/kamal/pathto/schemaSpy_5.0.0.jar -t pgsql -db dbnamehere -s public -u dhusername -p dbpassword -host localhost -port 5432  -o /home/kamal/outputdir -dp /home/kamal/pathto/postgresql-9.3-1104.jdbc4.jar

Steps for Designing a system from scratch

You are into a new project, and provided with some requirements. How would you go about designing the new system

We are in this situation a lot of times. So here I am trying to create a step by step guide from taking a requirement doc to finalizing a system architecture.

Stage 0: Before getting started with the design process, we need to make sure about the following.

– Do we have clear understanding of requirements?
– Are we creating something from scratch or enhancing and existing system. In later case we will have design and technology constraints from previous system?
– Have we identified non functional requirements- security, performance, availability etc.
– Have we identified all stakeholders and their role?
– Have we identified key players that will help in creating architecture (architects, Business Analysts, Product owners)
– Have we decided on time/ money to spent on design activities?
– Have we identified reference material? Do we have artifacts for similar design problems, from either inhouse or external sources?
– How are we going to maintain the design artifacts- wiki, git, svn, confluence etc. We will need to maintain versioning?
– Have we identified any guiding principles for the design- we will use open source softwares and tools, or we will be using linux system of deployment etc.
– Are there any constraints- say client wants to use any specific third party tools or technologies, any specific compliance required by law (multilingual support), service availability grantee
– Have we identified all third party systems with which our system will interact and how the interaction will be done?
– Are we creating the system in one go or will it be a phased delivery. Have we identified the value add provided by various components being built and prioritized the delivery?
– In case of phased delivery, we need to identify scope of each phase?
– Have we identified risks involved and mitigated them?
– If we are modifying or enhancing an existing system, we need to understand what areas can be reused, enhanced and built from scratch?
– Better to create a formal document to identify what all design artifacts are required.
– Define KPIs (Key performance indicators) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements)
– Have we defined acceptance criteria for the design?

Stage 1: Now we need to understand the business and what changes do we need.

– Have we understood organization structure?
– Have we identify business goals and objectives for the organization and what changes are required?
– Identify all business requirements, for example customer should be able to return a product is a business requirement.
– Identify and design current business processes (How current business work, does it fulfill all the business requirements or not, if yes, do we need to change or enhance the way it is being done right now, for example current purchase process is manual and we want to provide online options.)
– Identify changes or modification required in business processes

– Design artifacts to be delivered in this stage
Catalogs
— Organizations
— Actors
— Goals
— Roles
— Business Services
— Locations
— Process / Products
Matrices
— Business interaction
— Actor/ Role
Diagrams
— Business Services
— Functional Decomposition
— Product/ Process lifecycle
— Goal/ Service diagram
— Business Use cases
— Process Flow
— Event diagram

Stage 2: Focus on Data used

– What data is being used in the application? how it is originated and used?
– How the data is shared securely in enterprise
– Create common vocabulary and data definitions
– Identify security measures to be taken

– Design artifacts to be delivered in this stage
Catalogs
– Data Entities

Matrices
– Data Entity/ Business function
– Data Entity/ Application matrix

Diagrams
– Conceptual Data Diagram
– Logical Data Diagram
– Physical Data diagram
– Data lifecycle diagram
– Data Security diagram
– Data migration diagram

Stage 3: What all Applications are available? Changes required and new ones to be created

Application- Core parameters
– Platform independence
– Easy to use
– Identify existing applications and newly ones to be created at logical level and than map to physical level

– Design artifacts to be delivered in this stage
Catalogs
– Application portfolio
– Interface catalog

Matrices
– Application/ Organization
– Role/ Application
– Application/ Function
– Application/ Interactions

Diagrams
— Application communication
— Application and user location
— Application use case
— Application details – components/ modules and services
— Application details – Layered architecture if used

Stage 4: Understand the technology working behind the scenes

Control technical diversity: Minimizes cost of expertise.

Catalogs
— Technology portfolio

Matrices
— Application/ Technology

Diagrams
— Deployment diagram
— Environments and locations
— Communication engineering diagram (firewalls)

Stage 5: Lets consider Non Functional Requirements
— Security
— Performance
— Availability
— Disaster recover
— Data backups
— Others (Project specific)

Stage 6: Post Design phase:

– Did we identify reusable artifacts and services which can be used by other projects?
– Have we conducted periodic validation that design and product being build are in sync?
– Does the design change due to any change requests? Has that been reflected in design?
– Have we met all the acceptance criteria that were set initially?

Data Modeling at different levels

When you are designing database for an application, there can be 3 core levels at which you can design your database.

1. Conceptual Level: At this level you are only aware of high level entities and their relationships. For example you know that you have “Employee” Entity who “works for” a “Department” and “has” an “Address”. You are not worried about details.

2. Logical Level: You try to add as much details as possible, without worrying about how it will actually be converted to a physical database structure. So will provide any attributes for “Employee” i.e. Id, FirstName, LastName, AddressId, Salary and define primary and foreign key relations.

3. Physical Level: This is the actual representation of your database design with exact column names, types etc.

database

More info- http://www.1keydata.com/datawarehousing/data-modeling-levels.html

Open-Closed principle Revisited

Reference: http://kamalmeet.com/system-design-and-documentation/understanding-openclosed-principle/

Open closed principle states that your classes should be open for extension but closed for modification. One way to look at it is that when you provide a library or a jar file to a system, you can ofcourse use the classes or extend the classes, but you cannot get into the code and update it.

At a principle level, this means you should code in a manner that you never need to update your class once code. One major reason behind this principle is that you have a class which is reviewed and Unit tested, you would not like someone to modify and possibly corrupt the code.

How do I make sure that my class follow open closed principle?

Let’s look at a design of this MyPizza class

public class MyPizza {
public void createPizza(Pizza pizza)
{
if(pizza.type.equals("Cheese"))
{
//create a cheese pizza
}
else if(pizza.type.equals("Veg"))
{
//create a veg pizza
}
}
}

Following pizza type classes use this

class Pizza
{
String type;
}

class CheesePizza extends Pizza{
CheesePizza()
{
this.type=”Cheese”;
}
}

class VegPizza extends Pizza{
VegPizza()
{
this.type=”Veg”;
}
}

The above design clearly violates the open closed principle. What if I need to add a double cheese pizza here. I will have to go to MyPizza class and update it, which is not following “closed for modification” rule.

How can fix this design?

public class MyPizza {
public void createPizza(Pizza pizza)
{
pizza.create();
}
}

class CheesePizza extends Pizza{
CheesePizza()
{
this.type="Cheese";
}

public void create()
{
//do the creation here
}
}

With this simple modification we are making sure that we will need not change the code in MyPizza class even when we will add new types of pizza, as actual responsibility of creation would be with the new class being created (DoubleCheese).