Particular Software Blog

Latest articles

• Fallacy #6: There is one administrator

  Written by David Boike on January 6, 2021

  

  In small networks, it is sometimes possible to have one administrator. This is usually the developer who creates and deploys a small project. As a result, this developer has all of the information about this project readily available in their head and, if anything goes wrong, will know precisely what to do.

  I know quite a few developers and managers who talk about “bus theory” as a way to promote communication of critical knowledge. The central point is this: having only one person holding critical knowledge is dangerous because of what would happen if that person got run over by a bus. The term bus factor was coined to represent the number of people on your team who have to be hit by a bus before the project is in serious trouble.

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• Updates in ServiceControl 4.13

  Written by Mike Minutillo and Szymon Pobiega on December 15, 2020

  

  ServiceControl is the nerve center of your distributed system, storing the data and providing the APIs that allow ServicePulse and ServiceInsight to function.

  In ServiceControl 4.13, we’ve made updates that make saga auditing more useful, provide better support for Azure Service Bus, simplify license management, and make it easier to keep ServiceControl up to date.

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• Transactions with Azure Table Persistence

  Written by Daniel Marbach and Laila Bougria on December 8, 2020

  

  One of the major changes that have permeated organizations across the globe in the last decade is the use of cloud providers and the variety of services they offer. For data storage alone, Azure offers: Table Storage, CosmosDB, SQL Server, Blob Storage, and more. There are, of course, many advantages to these cloud services, like minimizing infrastructure management, and higher performance at a reasonable cost and it’s easy to accept these advantages in the face of the trade-offs, like giving… Read more →

• What's new in SQL Server Transport 6.2

  Written by Mauro Servienti, Tomek Masternak, and William Brander on December 1, 2020

  

  SQL Server Transport is one of our most popular transports. Customers often have deep proficiency with SQL and are able to use SQL Transport to add message queues to new or even legacy systems without needing to adopt (or get approval for) additional technology. This provides a glide path to begin using messaging, including all the advantages in loose coupling and reliability that come with it, and begin learning to design better software systems in a new way.

  SQL Server Transport version 6.2.0 adds a few important features to make building complex systems even easier.

  For extra secure systems, we’ve added support for SQL Server Always Encrypted so that messages can be encrypted so deeply that even SQL Server itself can’t read the messages without the correct keys. For scaled-out endpoints, you can now configure how the load balancing of batches is handled. We’ve also standardized the startup checks that endpoints do across all transaction modes.

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• Improvements to monitoring in ServicePulse 1.27

  Written by Sergio Cordeiro and Sean Farmar on November 24, 2020

  

  ServicePulse keeps on growing its arsenal of monitoring tools to help you uncover problems in your system and help fix them.

  In ServicePulse 1.27 we decided to focus on the monitoring views of ServicePulse and make it easier to slice and dice information. We’ve also made some changes to message archiving. Keep reading to learn more about some highlights of what’s available to you now.

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• NServiceBus on AWS Lambda

  Written by William Brander and David Boike — Last updated October 31, 2023

  

  The NServiceBus.AwsLambda.Sqs package makes it easier than ever to host NServiceBus endpoints in Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS Lambda is Amazon’s serverless technology for running your code in the cloud with zero administration. You can run code for just about anything and Amazon takes care of running and scaling your code with high availability. You only pay for the compute time you consume.

  As foundations go, this is as strong as bedrock. However, to build a complex distributed system on serverless technology that implements best practices from the Enterprise Integration Patterns book, you need something more that will bridge the gap between the “invisible” server infrastructure and your business code.

  That is where our new AWS Lambda SQS package comes in. NServiceBus provides the infrastructure code not provided by Lambda so that you can write business code and execute it in the Lambda environment. You can even use Lambda, with its cheap hosting model for rapid prototyping, and only later take advantage of the NServiceBus abstraction to easily shift hosting to container-based deployment or even to a competing cloud platform.

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• The power of Cosmos DB comes to NServiceBus

  Written by Bob Langley, Daniel Marbach, and Sean Feldman on October 27, 2020

  

  Update: NServiceBus persistence for Cosmos DB is now 1.0. In addition to full production support, that means API stability and backporting of bugfixes. See our release announcement here.

  With the recent preview release of NServiceBus.Persistence.CosmosDB, you can now use Azure Cosmos DB with NServiceBus! Backed by Cosmos DB, a fully managed, globally distributed, elastically scaled, pay-as-you-go service, your NServiceBus-based systems can benefit from guaranteed single-digit-millisecond latency with 99.999% availability. If you are already using Cosmos DB to store your business data, you no longer need to use a different storage technology to store your NServiceBus saga data.

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• What's new in ServiceInsight 2.2

  Written by Hadi Eskandari and Adam Ralph on October 21, 2020

  

  A common problem with most distributed systems is that it’s hard to get a good view of how all the disconnected pieces work together—unless you’re using ServiceInsight. From the audit records of successfully processed messages, ServiceInsight shows how messages are related and gives you visualizations so you can better understand how one message results in another, and how the different parts of the system communicate.

  ServiceInsight 2.2 is out now, with plenty of improvements. This release adds new insights (pun intended) to your distributed systems.

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• Optimizations to scatter-gather sagas

  Written by Jan Ove Skogheim on October 7, 2020

  

  Over the last several months we’ve been noticing that some of our customers were having trouble with the performance of some of their sagas. Invariably, the sagas that were at fault were examples of the scatter-gather pattern, and the ultimate culprit was contention at the storage level due to the optimistic concurrency strategy that was being used.

  This is a fairly common pattern for sagas to implement, and we didn’t want our customers to have to change how they model their business process to get around a performance problem, so we decided to fix it.

  In this article, I’ll explain what the scatter-gather pattern is, how a pure optimistic concurrency strategy created a problem, and what we’ve done to fix it for you.

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• Enhancements in NServiceBus Hosting

  Written by Daniel Marbach, Hadi Eskandari, and Andreas Öhlund on September 15, 2020

  

  The .NET Generic Host has become the de facto method of hosting applications built on .NET Core. To support the generic host, we released the NServiceBus.Extensions.Hosting package to make it simple to host NServiceBus within a .NET Core process or ASP.NET Core web application using the .UseNServiceBus(…) extension method.

  While a massive improvement for easily hosting NServiceBus in a .NET Core process, a few rough edges remained. For version 1.1, we aimed to make it easier than ever.

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  1. In the article on the ASP.NET Core Web Host, Microsoft states "This article covers the Web Host, which remains available only for backward compatibility. The Generic Host is recommended for all app types."

  2. Microsoft's Dependency Injection recommendations state "Avoid using the service locator pattern. For example, don't invoke GetService to obtain a service instance when you can use DI instead."Also, see Mark Seemann's post Service Locator is an Anti-Pattern.

  3. Such as GitHub Actions, Octopus Deploy, TeamCity, and dozens of others…

  4. Kubernetes, Service Fabric, Docker Compose, etc.