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ADR-0007 ZIO-fication of Responders

Date: 2023-02-20

Status

Accepted

Context

In order to remove all Akka dependencies, we have to migrate the existing Responders to a ZIO based implementation. This migration should be possible to do on a per Responder basis so that we do not do a single "big-bang" release with too much code changed at once.

Status Quo

The central and only Actor is the RoutingActor which contains instances of each Responder as a field. Each of the Responders needs an ActorRef to the RoutingActor and used the Akka "ask pattern" for communication with the other Responders. This means a Responder can only be created inside the RoutingActor because the RoutingActor must know every Responder in order to route the message but the Responder needs the ActorRef in order to communicate with the other Responders. This leads to a circular dependency between the RoutingActor and all Akka based Responders.

Goal

In the long term all Responders do not contain any Akka dependency anymore and all implementations currently returning a Future will return a zio.Task.

The zio.Task is a very suitable replacement for the Future because:

  • a Future[A] will complete with either a value A or with a failure Throwable.
  • a zio.Task[A] will succeed with either a value A or fail with an error of type Throwable.

Ideally all Responders will directly call the necessary components directly through invoking methods. However, this will not be possible in the beginning as there are Responders who call on each other creating yet another circular dependency which we cannot simply recreate with ZLayer dependency injection. Hence, a message like communication pattern through a central component the MessageRelay will be introduced which can replace the existing Akka "ask pattern" one to one in the ziofied component.

Solution

The MessageRelay is capable of relaying message to subscribed MessageHandlers and replaces the existing Akka "ask pattern" with the RoutingActor. Messages which will have a MessageHandler implementation must extend the RelayedMessage trait so that these are routed to the MessageRelay from the RoutingActor. All other messages will be handled as before.

In ziofied Responders we can use the MessageRelay for communication with all other Responders in a similar fashion as the Akka "ask pattern" by invoking the method MessageRelay#ask(ResponderRequest): Task[Any]. A special MessageHandler will route all messages which do not implement the RelayedMessage trait back to the RoutingActor, this is the AppRouterRelayingMessageHandler.

In the long run we will prefer to invoke methods on the respective ziofied services directly. This is now already possible for example with the TriplestoreServive, i.e. instead of calling MessageRelay#ask[SparqlSelectResul](SparqlSelectRequest) it is much easier and more importantly typesafe to call TriplestoreService#sparqlHttpSelect(String): UIO[SparqlSelectResult].

Communication between Akka based Responder and another Akka based Responder

Nothing changes with regard to existing communication patterns:

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    AkkaResponder ->> RoutingActor: "ask(Request)"
    activate RoutingActor
    RoutingActor ->> OtherAkkaResponder: "sends message to"
    activate OtherAkkaResponder
    OtherAkkaResponder ->> RoutingActor: "returns response"
    deactivate OtherAkkaResponder
    RoutingActor ->> AkkaResponder: "returns response"
    deactivate RoutingActor

Communication between Akka based Responder and ziofied Responder

The AkkaResponder code remains unchanged and will still ask the ActorRef to the RoutingActor. The RoutingActor will forward the message to the MessageRelay and return its response to the AkkaResponder.

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    AkkaResponder ->> RoutingActor: "ask(RelayedMessage)"
    activate RoutingActor
    RoutingActor ->> MessageRelay: "messageRelay.ask(RelayedMessage)"
    activate MessageRelay
    MessageRelay ->> MessageRelay: "finds MessageHandler"
    MessageRelay ->> ZioResponder: "calls .handle(Request)"
    activate ZioResponder
    ZioResponder ->> MessageRelay: "returns response"
    deactivate ZioResponder
    MessageRelay ->> RoutingActor: "returns response"
    deactivate MessageRelay
    RoutingActor ->> AkkaResponder: "returns response"
    deactivate RoutingActor

Communication between ziofied Responder and Akka based Responder

The AppRouterRelayingMessageHandler route all messages which do not implement the RelayedMessage trait to the RoutingActor.

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    ZioResponder ->> MessageRelay: "ask(Request)"
    activate MessageRelay
    MessageRelay ->> MessageRelay: "finds MessageHandler"
    MessageRelay ->> AppRouterRelayingMessageHandler: "calls .handle(Request)"
    activate AppRouterRelayingMessageHandler
    AppRouterRelayingMessageHandler ->> RoutingActor: "sends message to"
    deactivate AppRouterRelayingMessageHandler
    activate RoutingActor
    RoutingActor ->> AkkaResponder: "calls AkkaResponder"
    activate AkkaResponder
    AkkaResponder ->> RoutingActor: "returns response"
    deactivate AkkaResponder
    RoutingActor ->> MessageRelay: "returns response"
    deactivate RoutingActor
    MessageRelay ->> ZioResponder: "returns response"
    deactivate MessageRelay

Communication between two ziofied Responders

Variant using the MessageRelay

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    ZioResponder ->> MessageRelay: "ask(Request)"
    activate MessageRelay
    MessageRelay ->> MessageRelay: "finds MessageHandler"
    MessageRelay ->> OtherZioResponder: "calls .handle(Request)"
    activate OtherZioResponder
    OtherZioResponder ->> MessageRelay: "returns response"
    deactivate OtherZioResponder
    MessageRelay ->> ZioResponder: "returns response"
    deactivate MessageRelay

Variant if other Responder is a direct dependency

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    ZioResponder ->> TriplestoreService: "calls method"
    activate TriplestoreService
    TriplestoreService ->> ZioResponder: "returns response"
    deactivate TriplestoreService

Decision

In preparation of the move from Akka to ZIO, it was decided that the Responders should be ported to use return ZIOs and the MessageRelay instead of Futures and the ActorRef to the RoutingActor.

Consequences

In a first step only the Responders are going to be ported, one by one, to use the above pattern. The Akka Actor System still remains, will be used in the test and will be removed in a later step. Due to the added indirections and the blocking nature of Unsafe.unsafe(implicit u => r.unsafe.run(effect)) it is necessary to spin up more RoutingActor instances as otherwise deadlocks will occur. This should not be a problem as any shared state, e.g. caches, is not held within the RoutingActor or one of its contained Responder instances.

Last update: February 20, 2023