Instrumentation Manager Orchestrating Service Completion
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Solution Overview
Problem
In distributed computing environments, client applications lack reliable mechanisms to determine when service actions have completed, leading to potential task failures and degraded performance, as they often rely on assumptions or inferences about service completion states.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of an instrumentation manager that creates subscriptions to collect runtime instrumentation output from services, allowing the client application to receive a stream of state changes, enabling it to initiate subsequent operations only when necessary, thereby avoiding the limitations of polling and service modification techniques.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the client application polls services to check completion status, then it can determine when actions complete, but system complexity and resource consumption increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a feedback mechanism where services publish completion status to a topic, and the client application subscribes to receive automatic notifications. This eliminates the need for polling and provides reliable completion detection through event-driven feedback, resolving the contradiction between reliability and complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a message broker or event bus as an intermediary between services and the client application. This mediator handles the publication and subscription mechanics, simplifying the orchestration mechanism while maintaining reliable completion detection through standardized messaging patterns.
2Productivity
If the client application assumes service actions have completed, then it can proceed with dependent actions, but task failures occur when assumptions are incorrect
Solution Approach 1:
The subscription-based notification system provides real-time feedback on service completion status. The client application receives explicit confirmation before proceeding with dependent actions, eliminating incorrect assumptions while maintaining productivity through immediate notification upon completion.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary verification of service completion through the notification mechanism before the client application proceeds with dependent actions. This preliminary confirmation ensures reliability without significantly impacting productivity, as notifications are sent immediately when services complete.
3Ease of manufacture
If services lack interfaces for reporting completion, then service implementation is simpler, but the client application cannot reliably track action completion
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements self-service completion reporting where services automatically publish their own completion status to a topic without requiring explicit interface definitions. This maintains ease of service implementation while ensuring completion information is reliably transmitted through the publication-subscription mechanism.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent uses a universal topic-based publishing interface that can be implemented by any service regardless of its specific functionality. This universal approach maintains service implementation simplicity while ensuring completion status information is consistently available to all client applications through the standardized subscription mechanism.
Data Source
AI summary
Aspects extend to methods, systems, and computer program products for orchestrating operations at applications. Aspects of the invention use a side channel (instrumentation messages generated by a service) as a mechanism to discover when a service has completed an activity. Use of a side channel, allows a (e.g., client) application to create behaviors similar to service side interfaces and/or protocols without modifying a service. Accordingly, functionality can be added incrementally, safely, and cheaply without having to revise an underlying implementation. In one aspect, an instrumentation collector and publisher (ICP) facilitates the synchronization between services and an application. ICP is a scalable infrastructure that provides applications a way to interact with servers through instrumentation.