JavaScript Cloud Native Development Cookbook

Implementing idempotence with an inverse OpLock

From a business rule standpoint, it is important that events are processed exactly once; otherwise, problems may arise, such as double counting or not counting at all. However, our cloud-native systems must be resilient to failure and proactively retry to ensure no messages are dropped. Unfortunately, this means that messages may be delivered multiple times, for example when a producer re-publishes an event or a stream processor retries a batch that may have been partially processed. The solution to this problem is to implement all actions to be idempotent. This recipe implements idempotency with what I refer to as an inverse OpLock.