This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Naval Kishor Upadhyay
Principle #9: Disposability
Goal: Maximize robustness and agility by making processes fast to start and stop, and able to shut down gracefully without losing work.
What It Means
- Fast startup: Processes should initialize quickly so they can be brought online rapidly when demand increases.
- Graceful shutdown: When a process is stopped, it should finish ongoing work or save necessary state before exiting.
- Crash resilience: Processes can be stopped or restarted at any time without causing data loss or application failure.
- Support for scaling: Fast start/stop makes it easier to scale up and down in response to demand.
Why It Matters
- High availability: Quickly replace failed processes to keep the app running smoothly.
- Efficient scaling: Add or remove capacity instantly.
- Reliable deployments: Rolling updates happen faster and with less downtime.
- Better recovery: System can recover from failures with minimal disruption.
Example
A payment processing system:
- Worker processes handle payment requests from a queue.
- When scaling down, the process finishes processing the current payment before shutting down.
- New processes can start within seconds to handle sudden spikes in transactions.
Best Practices
- Design processes to start within seconds.
- Ensure processes handle termination signals gracefully.
- Avoid long-running in-memory tasks; use external queues or storage.
- Test scaling scenarios regularly.
- Use orchestration tools to manage process lifecycle.
Takeaway: Fast, disposable processes improve scalability, reduce downtime, and make your application more resilient to change and failure.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Naval Kishor Upadhyay