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Except it doesn’t, really. You don’t usually want your user sitting around waiting for all those services to talk to each other before they a notification that the process is complete or not.

Further, those complex interactions between those various services will be much hard to debug and tweak when trying to provide support to end users. Can’t pay your bill because Cognito is down? Can’t grant access because Stripe is down? The data warehouse is doing an index build so you can’t do any transactions? Guess we should turn off the website between 2AM and 4AM ET to allow for data warehouse rebuilds.

There’s a reason we don’t do things this way.



>> You don’t usually want your user sitting around waiting for all those services to talk to each other before they a notification that the process is complete or not.

I have had this exact use case in a problem I was solving where the user was waiting at the other end. Please do not presume that only the problems you have solved are worth solving or exist in the real world.


Also this:

>> Can’t pay your bill because Cognito is down?

I mean, if your AuthN and AuthZ is down, what else would you do ?!!

>> There’s a reason we don’t do things this way.

The smugness in this line is astounding. I don't think I can express how wrong you are.


> if your AuthN and AuthZ is down, what else would you do ?!!

Minor miscommunication… from a write standpoint. Obviously if you can’t auth, you are in trouble. But if the billing needs to happen so you can restore a permission, then you need to hit a card (for example) and then somehow update your authz service.

In most cases, it’s not strict availability that’s likely your problem (eg. Full down, no responses) it’s going to be business logic or config issues impacting a small subset of TX.

And, honest, if I’m so wrong about this, where is the XA distributed transaction coordinator for Cognito?

I’d be shocked if Amazon ever implemented a single-point-of-failure distributed transaction coordinator and exposed that from their services.




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