Microservice disaster crash recovery: A weak global referential integrity management

Abstract

Microservices which use polyglot persistence (using multiple data storage techniques) cannot be recovered in a consistent state from backups taken independently. As a consequence, references across microservice boundaries may break after disaster recovery. In this paper, we give a weak global consistency definition for microservice architectures and present a recovery protocol which takes advantage of cached referenced data to reduce the amnesia interval for the recovered microservice, i.e., the time interval after the most recent backup, during which state changes may have been lost.