Managing asynchronous workloads in a multi‐tenant microservice enterprise environment

Abstract A multi‐tenant microservice architecture involving components with asynchronous interactions and batch jobs requires efficient strategies for managing asynchronous workloads. This article addresses this issue in the context of a leading company developing tax software solutions for many national and multi‐national corporations in Brazil. A critical process provided by the company's cloud‐based solutions encompasses tax integration, which includes coordinating complex tax calculation tasks and needs to be supported by asynchronous operations using a message broker to guarantee order correctness. We explored and implemented two approaches for managing asynchronous workloads related to tax integration within a multi‐tenant microservice architecture in the company's context: (i) a polling‐based approach that employs a queue as a distributed lock (DL) and (ii) a push‐based approach named single active consumer (SAC) that relies on the message broker's logic to deliver messages. These approaches aim to achieve efficient resource allocation when dealing with a growing number of container replicas and tenants. In this article, we evaluate the correctness and performance of the DL and SAC approaches to shed light on how asynchronous workloads impact the management of multi‐tenant microservice architectures from delivery and deployment perspectives.