Revisiting the Outbox Pattern
published on 2024/11/02
Over the last few years, the outbox pattern has become a common solution for implementing data exchange flows between microservices. It allows services to safely and reliably update their own local datastore and at the same time send out notifications to other services via data streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka. But time isn’t standing still: people ask about disadvantages of the pattern (is the database becoming a bottleneck?), alternative solutions such as “listen-to-yourself” have been proposed, Kafka is about to get support for participating in 2-phase commit (2PC) transactions, and more. It’s time to take another look at the outbox pattern, what it is and how to implement it, whether it’s still relevant in 2024, and which alternatives exist!