Solving the Dual-Write Problem: Effective Strategies for Atomic Updates Across Systems
The dual-write problem occurs when two external systems must be updated in an atomic fashion. A classic example is updating an application’s database while pushing an event into a messaging system like Apache Kafka. If the database update succeeds but the write to Kafka fails, the system ends up in an inconsistent state. However, the dual-write problem isn’t unique to event-driven systems or Kafka. It occurs in many situations involving different technologies and architectures.