Abstract:
How do you back up a microservice? You dump its database. But how do you back up an entire application decomposed into microservices? In this article, we discuss the tradeoff between the availability and consistency of a microservice-based architecture when a backup of the entire application is being performed. We demonstrate that service designers have to select two out of three qualities: backup, availability, and/or consistency (BAC). Service designers must also consider how to deal with consequences such as broken links, orphan state, and missing state.