Microservice Orchestration for High-Throughput Airline Refunds
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Solution Overview
Problem
The current ticket refund process is highly manual, prone to errors, and time-consuming for both travelers and travel agents, lacking the necessary temporal requirements for prompt refunds.
Innovation Solution
A low latency, high-throughput transaction processing system utilizing a microservices architecture, including a central controller, parsers, secrets protection, communication, tax calculation, and vendor health monitoring services, to facilitate real-time processing of airline ticket refunds through natural language processing and container-based operations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If a manual refund processing system is used, then operational flexibility is maintained, but processing speed and accuracy deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The refund processing system is divided into independent microservices including authentication service, refund calculation service, tax calculation service, and notification service. Each microservice handles a specific aspect of refund processing independently, enabling parallel execution and improving overall processing speed while maintaining manageable complexity through modular architecture.
Solution Approach 2:
The manual mechanical refund processing system is replaced with an automated computer-based system that uses algorithms to calculate refunds, apply tax rules, and process transactions. This substitution eliminates manual errors and significantly increases processing speed while reducing operational complexity through standardized automated workflows.
2Loss of time
If real-time concurrent processing is implemented, then refund speed improves, but system resource consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system processes refund requests in batches with controlled concurrency levels, using asynchronous task queues to manage workload. Instead of processing all requests simultaneously, the system regulates the rate of processing to balance speed requirements with resource consumption, preventing system overload while maintaining low latency through efficient batch processing.
3Reliability
If manual refund processing is used, then system simplicity is maintained, but error rate and time consumption increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements comprehensive validation and verification mechanisms at each processing stage. Authentication service verifies user identities, refund calculation service validates eligibility criteria, and tax calculation service applies correct rates. Each microservice includes error handling and logging that provides feedback for corrective actions, ensuring high accuracy while managing complexity through structured validation protocols.
Data Source
AI summary
A method for low latency, high volume transaction processing. A set of transaction requests are received. In response to receipt of a transaction request, and for each transaction request, a set of tasks are orchestrated across a set of microservices, each of the microservices having a particular function uniquely associated with a transaction process, and wherein at least one microservice has an associated rules database. The database supports computation rules that are generated by applying natural language processing (NLP) to a rule set. Using the microservices, the set of transaction requests are concurrently processed, substantially in real-time, and by applying the set of computation rules. The results generated from concurrently processing the set of transaction requests are then returned. In one embodiment, each of the transaction requests are requests associated with an airline ticket and, in particular, a request to refund that ticket and any associated taxes and fees.