Distributed locking management becomes absolute building block for high scale system where data consistency is a top priority. Systems like online booking/inventory management where hundred and thousands requests gets process in parallel, this becomes a must have to maintain the consistency of data.
HealthKart being a omni-channel platform for selling health supplement and sport nutrition, we have centralized Inventory Management System where booking happens from so many sources in real time from different platforms. Distributed locking is our savior from managing our inventory consistency in real time.
Coming to Hazelcast, it is a distributed In Memory Data-grid used in very high traffic data servers to help improve latency to support more scalable transaction in an application.
We at HealthKart used it as our distributed caching mechanism and distributed locking medium to synchronize application across multiple distributed environment.
As a caching mechanism we had two standalone hazelcast cluster members with one acting as a master and 3 of our application servers acting as a cluster members. The cluster was a 3 CP member group. These 3 CP members were responsible for all the lock synchronization across the distributed architecture.
Advantages Offered by Hazelcast
- It offeres caching mechanism that can be replicated and sharded according to our needs
- It offers an efficient way of storing some distributed objects that can be shared among all cluster members.
- It offers a way in which we can execute a task and share the load with its distributed ExecuterService.
As it was shipped with so many things in a single package so it resolved our issues of having a cache and Locking in a very efficient manner, Hence, It became our first choice to go through with it.
Spring Boot has an inbuilt support for hazelcast. So once in class-path it automatically detects and sets all the auto configuration for it right away. For further twicking of functionality we did some modifications to the way the caching works by adding few interceptors and configuration via external XML file.
A more indepth Knowledge about how it works has been provided in the PDF attached which will clear your understandings about how it works and at what step we did some twicking according to our needs.
Photo by Kelvin Ang on Unsplash
Engineering @HealthKart 