Managing long-running asynchronous tasks in multi-tenant microservices

Abstract

A multi-tenant microservices architecture involving components with asynchronous interactions and batch jobs requires efficient strategies for managing asynchronous workloads. This work addresses this issue in the context of a leading company in the development of tax software solutions for many national and multinational companies in Brazil. A critical process provided by the company’s cloud-based solutions involves tax integration, which includes coordinating complex tax calculation tasks and needs to be supported by asynchronous operations using a message broker to ensure order correctness. These operations can be independent of each other, which characterizes the parallel process; or they can be dependent on each other, which characterizes the First in First out (FIFO) process. FIFO processes have additional restrictions regarding parallels. For this reason, we explored and implemented two approaches to managing asynchronous workloads related to tax integration within a multi-tenant microservices architecture in the enterprise context: (i) a polling-based approach that employs a queue as a Distributed Lock ( DL) and (ii) a push-based approach called Single Active Consumer (SAC) that relies on message broker logic to deliver messages. These approaches aim to achieve efficient resource allocation when dealing with an increasing number of container replicas and tenants. In this work, we evaluate the correctness and performance of DL and SAC approaches to clarify how asynchronous workloads impact the management of multi-tenant microservices architectures from a delivery and deployment perspective.