Build a Reliable System in a Microservices World at Snap - Snap Engineering
How do you orchestrate a complex workflow across tens of microservices running on multiple cloud providers? How do you build it reliably while focusing on core business logic?
In this post, we will talk about how Snap embraces the Temporal open source project to solve microservice orchestration with its powerful and flexible workflow engine.
Microservice oriented architecture has obvious advantages over a monolith setup especially in the modern world: clear responsibility and ownership model, easier to develop and maintain, easier to scale and regionalize, smaller blast radius and more. Snap Engineering has adopted the SOA architecture with the utilization of Envoy and Service Mesh. This effort brought flexibility and efficiency to our teams, while providing clear responsibility and separation for our organizational setup.
However, with microservices, things are distributed across multiple fleets, databases, regions and cloud providers. Building a reliable and efficient system that can communicate between services, maintain application states and gracefully deal with outages has become a hard problem. In order to properly orchestrate services and track application states, technologies including queues and databases are often used. Engineers end up spending lots of time implementing state tracking functionality and writing error handling code to keep their system intact and resilient to component failures.
