When integrating independent services to build larger systems, it’s often important for services to keep track of the status of the other services that they depend on. Especially for a microservices approach, where services should expect their dependencies can be absent at any point in time. Services that cope with dependencies being unavailable make a less flaky and more resilient, hands off system.
Services can dynamically change their behaviour as the states of their dependencies change. If a dependency is offline, a service can decide to re-route work, buffer it until processing can resume, or explicitly reject requests. Doing this proactively by reacting to changes in dependencies’ statuses makes this much more fluid.
This post will look at a simple way of using Reactive Extensions to keep track of dependency status.
Code and a glass of wine 