everest

A Clojure/Postgres-based event store/library/toolkit.

When you should use it?

• You don't need to process terabytes of events (Postgres will deal perfectly fine with tables that fit in RAM)
• You are OK with what Postgres offers for HA (getting simpler with each release)
• You believe in event-based integration
• You are a fan of event sourcing/event driven integration

Alternative Event Store implementations:

• Rill - also based on Postgres, opinionated
• NEventStore - if you prefer .NET

Alternatives if Postgres doesn't cut your needs:

• Kafka
• GEventStore

TODO

• Tests with embedded Postgres
• More examples
  • use with Component
  • auto load handlers
  • event sourcing
  • recover from failure
  • transactional handlers
  • complicated handler state

Design

Everest is split into several modules:

• Core [everest]
  • core event store protocols
  • in-memory event store implementation
  • implementation-agnostic subscription mechanism
• PG [everest.module/pg] - relational event store implementation using Postgres
• PG Schema [everest.module/pg-schema] - schema for the JDBC module with Flyway-based migrations
• JSON [everest.module/json] - Cheshire (Jackson)-based store middleware for serialization/deserialization into JSON
• DSL [everest.module/dsl] - experimental DSL to compose event handlers

Event Store

Everest event store interface is highly influenced by Greg Young's excellent EventStore. It supports the following operations:

• read-event to read a single event
• read-stream-forward to read all events in the given stream starting from the given position
• read-stream-backward to read all events in the given stream starting from the given position towards the beginning
• delete-stream! to delete the given stream and all of the events
• append-events! to append a number of events to the given stream

There is a special :all stream which returns all of the events in the store. It is not possible to delete or append to the :all stream.

Delete and append operations expect an expected-version argument which will check the following:

• if :everest.stream.version/any - no check is performed
• if :everest.stream.version/not-present - the stream should not exist
• if a number - the last event in the stream should be at the given position

Subscriptions

One great advantage of having the events is being able to react to them as they appear. Everest event store supports subscriptions through the everest.store/subscribe function which returns a stream of events for the given stream starting right after the provided position.

Store and Subscription Middleware

Everest supports a concept of store middleware which allows wrapping the events coming in and out of the event store with custom functions. This fits the Clojure mindset very well and is very convenient for pluggable event serialization, validation and coercion, discussed further below.

Event Serialization

Everest provides a JSON serialization middleware, everest.json.store.middleware/wrap-cheshire-json, which will serialize the events going into the store and deserialize ones coming out. It plays especially well with Postgres' json/jsonb database types.

We can create our own middleware easily by wrapping e.g. Nippy or Avro.

Event Schemas and Versioning

A common need when working with data in a dynamic language is making sure data follows the specification. Clojure has a de-facto standard for dynamic validation and coercion: clojure.spec. There's no module in Everest to provide Spec-based event validation, but it would be quite easy to implement!

Furthermore, events evolve. Although a contract for an event shouldn't change drastically, it may change in a non-compatible way which could require migration. Obviously, we should try to evolve the contracts in a backwards-compatible manner. If that isn't possible, we need to implement custom logic which will migrate the events to the newest versions upon loading.

We can choose from the following migration/versioning strategies:

1. Do nothing. Handle upgrades in the application code of aggregates, projections and processes.
2. Define upcasters in the components which own the events. Projections and processes in other components will have to work with old event versions.
3. Upcasters in contract libraries. Package event definitions into separate libraries and include them as dependencies in consuming projects. This will ensure the upcasters will run every time the events are read.
4. Upcaster migrations. Write an upcaster in the component which owns the event and run it on the event store to update the events. This will work in Postgres, but only for upcasters that do not split the event into multiple ones while upcasting. These kinds of upcasters would have to append more events which would get propagated to the subscriptions. This could theoretically be dealt with by adding some sort of metadata which would be used in subscriptions to filter out such upcasted events.

If you need to break your contracts - solution #3 is preferable.

For more insight into event versioning:

• https://abdullin.com/post/event-sourcing-versioning/
• http://files.movereem.nl/2017saner-eventsourcing.pdf
• https://leanpub.com/esversioning/read

Currently Everest doesn't provide any abstractions to deal with upcasting, as the scenarios for upcasting are quite different, e.g.:

• Upcast an event by supplying a default value based on the version defined in its metadata
• Upcast an event by looking up data in the external sources
• Upcast an event by capturing the state seen earlier in the stream
• Split an event into multiple events

Event Handlers

Once events are in the store, we want to read and react to them. This is achieved by subscribing to the new events using the subscription mechanism provided by Everest. However, just getting a hold of an event stream is too low level. Usually we want to do one of the few basic things:

• Process a number of events and write the results into some other representation
• Raise more events in response to processed events
• Interact with the outside world in response to processed events
• Wrap the above interactions into a state machine which reacts to events (also known as a Process Manager)

An event handler will most surely want to track its position in the event stream so that it doesn't have to process all of the events every time it starts up. Position tracking is also much simpler to reason about if the position is saved atomically with the result of processing the event. This way idempotency is guaranteed and there's no trouble in performing a live back up of the position together with the result.

Thus, an event handler will want to access an event together with some kind of context, be it a component or just a map holding the handler's state. Also, you will probably want to run the handlers in such a manner so as not to interfere with the workings of other handlers. If a handler is slow or failing, it should not affect the other handlers.

All of the cross-cutting concerns that affect many handlers should be expressed as event-handler middleware. An event is just a map which can be assoced with additional stuff at any point in the middleware chain. The same way it works with Ring:

• event ~= request
• event handler = Ring handler
• event handler middleware = Ring handler middleware

Although the concept of an event handler is very simple, handling some of the common cases is quite tricky and Everest aims to provide support for some of the patterns.

Projections and Other Simple Event Handlers

Projections are the simplest type of event handlers. They consume an event and produce a result - storing it either in a persistent storage or memory - then wait for another event.

Everest provides some generic projection middleware:

• everest.handler.middleware/wrap-position - tracks the current position of the handler
• everest.handler.middleware/wrap-state - tracks the state returned from the handler

These middlewares can be parameterized with the :handler.middleware/state-store which controls where the handler state will be stored. Everest provides a JDBC-based setup for position/state tracking.

Position updates only:

(def handler-state-store (memory.handler.store/create))

(everest.handler.middleware/wrap-position
  (fn [event]
    (println "Hi: " (:name event)))
  {:handler.middleware/state-store handler-state-store})

Position and state updates:

(everest.handler.middleware/wrap-state
  (fn [event]
    (update event :handler/state (fnil inc 0)))
  {:handler.middleware/state-store handler-state-store
   :handler.middleware/state-key :handler/state}) ;; default value

The above functionality depends on the JDBC-specific middleware:

• wrap-connection - opens the connection, attaches it to the event and executes the handler
• wrap-tx - runs the wrapped handler inside of the transaction

So you would actually use it like so:

(-> event-handler
    (wrap-state {:get-state (get-fn 'HandlerId)
                 :upsert-state (upsert-fn 'HandlerType 'HandlerId)})
    (wrap-tx)
    (wrap-connection {:db dbspec}))

Of course, clojure data cannot be stored in the JDBC-backed storage without serialization. Serialization is also dealt with via middleware, which we'll touch upon a bit later.

License

Copyright © 2017 Vadim Platonov

Distributed under the MIT License.