Zync - the sync tool

Zync is going to take your 3scale data and pushes it somewhere else, reliably. Offers only one directional sync (from 3scale to other systems).

Building from Source

This component is deployed as part of the overall 3scale API Management solution.

Please see these instructions and Quickstart guide on how to set up your development environment locally and these instructions to integrate it with Porta and Keycloak.

Terminology

Before describing the design it is important to define the terms.

• Zync - deployment of this project, Web API.

• 3scale - 3scale API Manager (Porta).

• Tenant - mapping of Provider id registered in 3scale API Manager to the domain and access token.

• Model - relevant object in 3scale like Application, Limit, Metric, Service.

• Notification - Message sent to Zync describing the model that changed and having all required properties to fetch it from the API later.

  • Example: Application 3456, tenant_id: 26
  • Example: Limit 4566, metric_id: 36, application_id: 46, tenant_id: 16

• Update - Zync fetches updated Model from the Notifier via the API using the information provided by the Notification.

• Lock - the mechanism that prevents concurrent data access to the same scope.

  • Example: Tenant Lock would mean only one can be running for one Tenant.
  • Example: Model Lock - only one per uniquely identified Model.

• Entry - The information from the API provided by the Update.

• Log - ordered list of Entries as they were received.

• Push - a call from Zync to external service updating model data

• Integration - code that pushes Log entries one-by-one for the same Model to some external service.

  • Integration can access the entries log to fetch more data and for example handle model dependencies by accessing all dependent models and delete them before deleting the parent.
  • Integration keeps Status of each model synchronization state. If a push fails status should be updated to reflect that and keep trying.

• Integration Configuration - configuration for each instance of Integration for each Tenant. It is populated the same way as Model - by Notification and Fetch.

Design

Zync is meant to synchronize data from 3scale to external systems (like IDPs). Some people use Web-hooks for this but without further logic, they can be unreliable and arrive out of order. This tool is meant to synchronize the final state to a different system.

The flow is defined as 3scale -> Zync ( <- 3scale) -> Integration. So 3scale notifies Zync there was a change to a model but does not say more than the primary key and information required to fetch it from the 3scale API. In some cases model needs just its primary key (id) and in some, it needs other metadata (usually primary keys of its parents) to compose the API call (service_id, metric_id, …).

Zync upon receiving the notification will acquire an update model lock and try to perform an update. Any information received this way is added as an entry to the log and the model lock is released. That entry can be either new data or information that the record is no longer there (404 from the API). If new notification came when the model lock was acquired, it is going to be processed after the lock is released.

After adding entry to the log an integration is triggered and acquires an integration model lock so it will process only one (latest) entry for a model at a time. After the integration finishes (with both failure or success) it will release the lock and trigger another run if failed.

Properties

Given the locking on the model there will be some parallelization, but also updates to one object will be serialized. This needs to be done to limit the network issues and ensure the request was delivered before issuing a new one.

Because Zync will keep a log of events it will be able to replay changes and recover the last state just taking last revisions of each model and even remove the ones that have been created before but have been deleted.

Data Model

Record types are for enforcing correctness of data on the database level and referential integrity. There is one relationship (Model -> Record) that can't have foreign constraints but can be recreated from other data.

Tenant

Notification

Application (Record)

Service (Record)

Metric (Record)

UsageLimit (Record)

Model

Update

Entry

Status