GRIT: Consistent Distributed Transactions Across Polyglot Microservices with Multiple Databases

Abstract

The popular microservice architecture for applications brings new challenges for consistent distributed transactions across multiple microservices. These microservices may be implemented in different languages, and access multiple underlying databases. Consistent distributed transactions are a real requirement but are very hard to achieve with existing technologies in these environments. In this demo we present GRIT: a system that resolves this challenge by cleverly leveraging deterministic database technologies and optimistic concurrency control protocol(OCC). A transaction is optimistically executed with its read-set and write-set captured during the execution phase. Then at the commit time, conflict checking is performed and a global commit decision is made. A logically committed transaction is persisted into logs first, and then asynchronously applied to the physical databases deterministically. GRIT is able to achieve consistent, high throughput and serializable distributed transactions for any applications invoking microservices. The demonstration offers a walk-through of how GRIT can easily support distributed transactions across multiple microservices and databases.