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Home/Magazine Archive/November 2018 (Vol. 61, No. 11)/Tracking and Controlling Microservice Dependencies/Abstract

Practice

Tracking and Controlling Microservice Dependencies

By Silvia Esparrachiari Ghirotti, Tanya Reilly, Ashleigh Rentz
Communications of the ACM, November 2018, Vol. 61 No. 11, Pages 98-104
10.1145/3267118
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man peering into locked car — Credit: Vershinin89

In search of a cappuccino, cheese bread, and a place to check her email, Silvia walked into a coffee shop. Upon connecting to the Wi-Fi hotspot, a captive portal prompted her to log in and offered a few third-party authentication options. When she clicked on one of the access token providers, her browser showed a "No Internet Connection" error. Since she didn't have access to the network, she could not get an OAuth token—and she couldn't access the network without one.

This anecdote illustrates a critical detail of system design that can easily go unnoticed until an outage takes place: cyclic dependencies.

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