As organizations migrate to the cloud, they desire to exploit this on-demand infrastructure to scale their applications. But such migrations are usually complex and need established patterns and control points to manage. In my previous blog posts, I covered a few of the proven designs for cloud applications. In this article, I’ll introduce the Orchestration Pattern (also known as the Orchestrator Pattern) to add to the list. This technique allows the creation of scalable, reliable, and fault-tolerant systems. The approach can help us manage the flow and coordination among components of a distributed system, predominantly in a microservices architecture. Let’s dive into a problem statement to see how this pattern works.
Problem Context
Consider a legacy monolith retail e-commerce website. This complex monolith consists of multiple subdomains such as shopping baskets, inventory, payments etc. When a client sends a request, the website performs a sequence of operations to fulfil the request. In this traditional architecture, each operation can be described as a method call. The biggest challenge for the application is scaling with the demand. So, the organisation decided to migrate this application to the cloud. However, the monolithic approach that the application uses is too restricted and would limit scaling even in the cloud. Adopting a lift and shift approach to perform migration would not reap the real benefits of the cloud.