go.fallback

Remote calls can often hang until they timed out. To avoid a failure, Fallback makes a set of standby providers that work with the same task. It allows creating a hierarchy from a group of primary and secondary providers. Thus if none of the primary providers solved a task, secondary providers take a chance return a successful response. In the meantime, Fallback controls thread-safe execution and failover synchronization.

Primary

Primary approach resolves the first non-error result. A group is successful if any of goroutines was completed without an error.

var result string

p := fallback.NewPrimary()
p.Go(func() (func(), error) {
  return nil, errors.New("broken")
})
p.Go(func() (func(), error) {
  return func() {
    result = "ok"
  }, nil
})

if p.Wait() {
  fmt.Printf("result = ", result)
}
// Output:
// result = ok

Go accepts Func type with func() (func(), error) signature. Func perfoms a task and returns an error or "done" function. "Done" function will be executed in thread-safe mode. There is you can do assignments in shared memory without locks or semaphores. Basically, "done" function is performed once.

Secondary

Secondary approach waits for primary's result and performs secondary goroutines if a primary was failed.

var result string

p := fallback.NewPrimary()
p.Go(func() (func(), error) {
  fmt.Println("primary is broken")
  return nil, errors.New("broken")
})

s := fallback.NewSecondary(p)
s.Go(func() (func(), error) {
  return nil, errors.New("broken")
})
s.Go(func() (func(), error) {
  fmt.Println("secondary helps")
  return func() {
    result = "ok"
  }, nil
})

if s.Wait() {
  fmt.Printf("result = ", result)
}
// Output:
// primary is broken
// secondary helps
// result = ok

Also, you can run a secondary without a primary wait. It helps getting a fallback result early even if a primary will failed unexpectedly.

var result string

p := fallback.NewPrimary()
p.Go(func() (func(), error) {
  time.Sleep(time.Second)
  fmt.Println("primary is broken")
  return nil, errors.New("broken")
})

s := fallback.NewSecondary(p)
s.Go(func() (func(), error) {
  fmt.Println("secondary helps")
  return func() {
    result = "ok"
  }, nil
})

s.Shift() // start a secondary immediately

if s.Wait() {
  fmt.Printf("result = ", result)
}
// Output:
// secondary helps
// primary is broken
// result = ok

Context

You can create Primary or Secondary with a context. It allows cancelling a group if any of goroutines completed successfully.

var result string

p, ctx := fallback.NewPrimaryWithContext(context.Background())
p.Go(func() (func(), error) {
  fmt.Println("the first is good")
  return func() {
    result = "A"
  }, nil
})
p.Go(func() (func(), error) {
  select {
  case <-time.After(time.Second):
    return func() {
      result = "B"
    }, nil
  case <-ctx.Done():
    fmt.Println("the second is canceled")
    return nil, ctx.Err()
  }
})

if p.Wait() {
  fmt.Printf("result = ", result)
}
// Output:
// the first is good
// the second is canceled
// result = A

Benchmark

I have run a benchmark on MacBook Pro with CPU 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 and RAM 8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3:

BenchmarkPrimary-4                         2000000         899 ns/op         48 B/op        1 allocs/op
BenchmarkPrimaryWithCanceledSecondary-4    1000000        2037 ns/op        176 B/op        4 allocs/op
BenchmarkSecondaryWithFailedPrimary-4      1000000        2529 ns/op        192 B/op        5 allocs/op

Contributing

If you know another fallback approaches or algorithms then feel free to send them in a pull request. Unit tests are required.