reactivemanifesto / reactivemanifesto

The Reactive Manifesto

The Reactive Manifesto

Organisations working in disparate domains are independently discovering patterns for building software that look the same. These systems are more robust, more resilient, more flexible and better positioned to meet modern demands.

These changes are happening because application requirements have changed dramatically in recent years. Only a few years ago a large application had tens of servers, seconds of response time, hours of offline maintenance and gigabytes of data. Today applications are deployed on everything from mobile devices to cloud-based clusters running thousands of multi-core processors. Users expect millisecond response times and 100% uptime. Data is measured in petabytes. Today's demands are simply not met by yesterday’s software architectures.

We believe that a coherent approach to systems architecture is needed, and we believe that all necessary aspects are already recognised individually: we want systems that are Responsive, Resilient, Elastic and Message Driven. We call these Reactive Systems.

Systems built as Reactive Systems are more flexible, loosely-coupled and scalable. This makes them easier to develop and amenable to change. They are significantly more tolerant of failure and when failure does occur they meet it with elegance rather than disaster. Reactive Systems are highly responsive, giving users effective interactive feedback.

Reactive Systems are:

• Responsive: The system responds in a timely manner if at all possible. Responsiveness is the cornerstone of usability and utility, but more than that, responsiveness means that problems may be detected quickly and dealt with effectively. Responsive systems focus on providing rapid and consistent response times, establishing reliable upper bounds so they deliver a consistent quality of service. This consistent behaviour in turn simplifies error handling, builds end user confidence, and encourages further interaction.
• Resilient: The system stays responsive in the face of failure. This applies not only to highly available, mission-critical systems — any system that is not resilient will be unresponsive after a failure. Resilience is achieved by replication, containment, isolation and delegation. Failures are contained within each component, isolating components from each other and thereby ensuring that parts of the system can fail and recover without compromising the system as a whole. Recovery of each component is delegated to another (external) component and high availability is ensured by replication where necessary. The client of a component is not burdened with handling its failures.
• Elastic: The system stays responsive under varying workload. Reactive Systems can react to changes in the input rate by increasing or decreasing the resources allocated to service these inputs. This implies designs that have no contention points or central bottlenecks, resulting in the ability to shard or replicate components and distribute inputs among them. Reactive Systems support predictive, as well as Reactive, scaling algorithms by providing relevant live performance measures. They achieve elasticity in a cost-effective way on commodity hardware and software platforms.
• Message Driven: Reactive Systems rely on asynchronous message-passing to establish a boundary between components that ensures loose coupling, isolation, and location transparency. This boundary also provides the means to delegate failures as messages. Employing explicit message-passing enables load management, elasticity, and flow control by shaping and monitoring the message queues in the system and applying back-pressure when necessary. Location-transparent messaging as a means of communication makes it possible for the management of failure to work with the same constructs and semantics across a cluster or within a single host. Non-blocking communication allows recipients to only consume resources while active, leading to less system overhead.

Large systems are composed of smaller ones and therefore depend on the Reactive properties of their constituents. This means that Reactive Systems apply design principles so these properties apply at all levels of scale, making them composable. The largest systems in the world rely upon architectures based on these properties and serve the needs of billions of people daily. It is time to apply these design principles consciously from the start instead of rediscovering them each time.

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reactivemanifesto's Issues

Italian translation of the Manifesto

Hi, I have translated README.md and glossary.md files to Italian... hope this helps.

I will issue a pull-request

Chinese "Suggest improvements" link - 404 error

In the page http://www.reactivemanifesto.org/zh-CN

Suggest improvements is 404.

And i think right link is https://github.com/reactivemanifesto/reactivemanifesto/blob/master/README.zh-cn.md

Typo in German version, should be "September", not "Septempter"

It seems the publishing date is not part of the actual text, so I can't fix it in a PR. On the German version of the site it says

"Veröffentlicht am 16. Septempter 2014 (v2.0)"

The word for the ninth month of the year is spelled September, not Septempter.

void

clarify that Distribution vs. Simplicity is a trade-off that needs to be made consciously

We currently postulate that every system needs to value Resilience and Elasticity higher than simplicity or maintainability, but there are certainly many cases where avoiding the non-determinism that comes with distribution is more desirable than a few more 9’s in uptime. Most notably this is true for applications that are sufficiently available based on human intervention during office hours—internal services modeling business processes are an example.

Without diluting the point that if you are forced by your requirements designing according to the Reactive principles is our clearly preferred approach, we should add that this force is relative and may be outweighed on a case by case basis. Consequences include applying Reactive at a more coarse-grained granularity or foregoing it entirely—as a conscious and well-educated decision.

The picture of structure of Reactive values is wrong.

did not match the picture in RPD(Reactive Design Pattern)

As @rkuhn 's reply, the picture is wrong and should alias with that in the RDP.

Event driven/centric is not bad and a message-driven-only system could be not resilient enough

Example: 2 endpoints. (E1 and E2)
Issue 1: E1 wants to talk to E2, but E2 its down.
MessageDrivenOnly: E1 will fail.
EventCentric: E1 will publish its desire as a durable event, and eventually E2 will get up and receive the payload, as a subscriber.

Issue 2: E2 needs all events that E1 published, but E2 was down for a long time.
MessageDriven: E2 can request historical messages from E1, but what about the new messages that E1 is emmiting while E2 is reading old messages? Back pressure is not allowed.
EventCentric: E2 gets all the events that happened E1, because E2 is always polling for new messages. E2 will be eventually consistent.

Afrikaans Translation

Hi, I have started with an Afrikaans translation.

Will issue a pull request soon if contributions are still welcome :)

Github signup does not work

I get redirected to an empty page after github auth.

HTTPS cert on reactivemanifesto.org has expired

See https://www.reactivemanifesto.org/

Expired on 30 Dec 2023

Clarify that component boundaries are meant generically, not only for Software

The current text, especially of the Resilience part, is not clear enough on which level of abstraction or architectural granularity we mean, it can be misunderstood to prescribe exactly the Actor Model. While that model is a good fit for the software aspects—but by no means the only one!—we need to make it clear that hardware boundaries are equally important and that encapsulation of different services is a generic concern that can be addressed in several different ways.

fix grammatical error: "in order to for the application"

"Non-blocking means the ability to make continuous progress in order to for the application"

Provide learning resources

I think motivation is good, but if we could create a wiki page or a learning resource page, which has correct content for guiding the motivated souls will be effective

WWW is filled with so many content on this, but I feel each puts forwards its own interpretation and confusing the last one we might have red

Sign the manifesto link from README should contain hash part

It is required for linking directly to "Sign the manifest" button.

Too many signs added by me.

https://www.reactivemanifesto.org/

name: jong hyeon yeo

void

The `Parnas (1972)` link that appears in the Component Glossary section is no longer accessible

@jboner The Parnas (1972) link that appears in the Component Glossary section is no longer accessible https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/criteria.pdf

Brazilian portuguese title.

I don't believe "O Manifesto Reativo" is the best way to refer to this in brazilian portuguese. What you guys would think if the seme title was used on both portuguese versions, or that we used "O manifesto de sistemas reativos", like the spanish one?

Please consider accessibility at least when rendering the manifesto

The rendered copy (web and pdf) use a particularly low contrast font setting. Granted the Reactive Manifesto doesn't mention the idea that a system should be accessible but I feel that increasing the readability of the website would be a great service to your members and potential members. Reference 2, below gives a decent explanation of the concepts in 1.

References:

1. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#contrast-minimum
2. https://webaim.org/articles/contrast/

sing with github account get 403 forbidden

Twitter account

Just created a twitter account for Reactive Manifesto (@activemanifesto) and hope to be of help by promoting the site and the great manifesto.

Chinese version reviewing and collaboration.

Refs https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LLQoRHsrwXFyWD-X8vvhupbLtb2jtWF0RfTCt1w8Z-Y/edit?usp=sharing

Will be a PR ends up here.

void

What can I do to deploy a translation to web?

Hi,

Recently, I wrote a translation in Korean #91 . But, It's not deployed yet. It may be related to website-manifesto

Should I do something for deployment or not? Can I hear more information or process?

Thanks.

Broken link in Glossary: Component

The glossary entry for Component references "Parnas (1972)". The underlying link redirects to https://kilthub.cmu.edu/, instead of a specific paper.

I suspect that the reference is about "On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules", which I found here:
https://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/edu/2ip30/references/criteria_for_modularization.pdf

There's a different report with that title on the kilthub site, but from 1971 rather than 1972:
https://kilthub.cmu.edu/articles/On_the_criteria_to_be_used_in_decomposing_systems_into_modules/6607958

I guess the stable reference would be this one: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=361623m
but the ACM doesn't provide a free download of the paper.

Safari crash in "Sign the manifesto" on the web page

Version 6.0.5 (8536.30.1) on Mountain Lion (10.8.5), clicking the "Sign the manifesto" button causes Safari to unceremoniously crash - it instantly disappears. I signed the manifesto using Chrome, which worked flawlessly.

Here's some of the output that would go to Apple:

Process:         WebProcess [1682]
Path:            /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WebKit2.framework/WebProcess.app/Contents/MacOS/WebProcess
Identifier:      com.apple.WebProcess
Version:         8536 (8536.30.1)
Build Info:      WebKit2-7536030001000000~9
Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:  ??? [1680]
User ID:         9900184

Date/Time:       2013-11-26 09:44:37.785 -0500
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.8.5 (12F45)
Report Version:  10

Interval Since Last Report:          490191 sec
Crashes Since Last Report:           265424
Per-App Interval Since Last Report:  568886 sec
Per-App Crashes Since Last Report:   4
Anonymous UUID:                      

Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:  EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Application Specific Information:
Assertion failed: (s->stack->next != NULL), function CGGStackRestore, file Context/CGGStack.c, line 77.

Bundle controller class:
BrowserBundleController

typo in Persian translation of `Full list`

I couldn't find that translation in Persian translation file.
the right phrase is لیست کامل but in the Persian page, it's لسیت کامل
you can see the diff here

grammatical error: "so than one"

"much better so than one based purely on synchronous method calls."

Website SSL issue

Getting an SSL related error in Chrome when opening the website.

See:
https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=https://www.reactivemanifesto.org

"None of the common names in the certificate match the name that was entered (www.reactivemanifesto.org). You may receive an error when accessing this site in a web browser"

:-)

Please list the major authors of the manifesto

It would be nice to know who wrote the Reactive Manifesto. I have heard some claim that this is just a vehicle for pushing people towards Akka, though I know that several non-Typesafe people have also contributed. Listing the major contributors would allow people to make up their own mind about whether this is a marketing exercise by one company or the consensus view of a broad range of specialists from across the industry. Greater transparency will either give more credence to the opinions therein or make it clear that this is mainly the work of some smart people in one or two companies. Either way, the community will benefit from that transparency.

I thought about doing a pull request based on the commit log, but I suspect a lot of the contribution has happened in emails and conversations rather than through GitHub. :)

Wrong link to CS version of README.cs.md

The button "Suggest improvements" on the webpage https://www.reactivemanifesto.org/cz wrongly navigates to https://github.com/reactivemanifesto/reactivemanifesto/blob/master/README.cz.md instead of https://github.com/reactivemanifesto/reactivemanifesto/blob/master/README.cs.md

Suggested fix:

• change cz to cs

Responsive, resilient, elastic are desired qualities whereas message-driven is a design approach

The characterization of reactive systems mixes two things:

• Responsive, resilient, and elastic are desired quality attributes of a reactive system. The description is not enlightening. One can argue that those are desired qualities of general distributed systems.
• Message-driven is the key design approach to be followed in reactive systems.

Overall, the quality attributes (responsive, resilient, elastic) are the result of employing a message-driven design.

My suggestion:

• Describe reactive systems as systems that follow a message-driven approach, possibly adding some other constraints to be more specific.
• Add a separate subsection to say what qualities well-designed reactive systems shall exhibit. In here you mention responsive, resilient, elastic. But you could also add: runtime autonomy and loose-coupling.
• Acknowledge that tradeoffs exist.

void

Signing is not possible anymore, infinite redirect or OAuth error

The sign button is still present on the live website, however, clicking it, and then selecting either GitHub or Google leads to either an infinite redirection error (GitHub) or an OAuth error (Google).

I propose to either fix this issue, or to disable the sign button, unless a better solution comes around.

Erroneous behavior seen here: https://www.reactivemanifesto.org/

I would like add a spanish translation

i would feel if you left me to translate the spanish manifesto and thus have a version available for spanish developers.

void

improve text readability

Hi,

I'd like to contribute some css change that potentially could improve the reading experience of the reactive manifesto, but not sure where I can make a pull-request to.

Any hint?

---

#chargedByZenHub

void

The Title of Chinese version is not updated accordingly on https://www.reactivemanifesto.org/

The content was updated as per PR #115 , however, title seems unchanged.

remove extraneous sentence from German translation

The second sentence for “Elastic” has no corresponding part in the English version, it repeats some background conclusion that is otherwise stated later in the paragraph as well.

A grammar question

Hi,
In first sentence of the manifesto, what does "look the same" refer to? "software" or "patterns"?
thanks.

Need Huge "We Are Reactive" img (svg)

I'm trying to promote Reactivity at work, and want to print out a banner. Is it possible for you guys to host original svg/psd files as well?

(Specifically I'm wanting an orange right)

'reactivemanifesto' ribbon has size issues on mobile browsers

For instance if you tried to read Play documentation on the phone the ribbon will be shield big portion of useful text - I guess that this ribbon should very tiny on small screen sizes.

tested on: ios 7 - safari, chrome ; android 4.0.4 chrome

Change to Chinese version of RM

Please replace the word "Reactive" from “响应式” >>>>>>> to >>>>>> “反应式”

void

-

Visual for REACTIVE manifesto adoption needed

Hi all.
To arg about REACTIVE approach and it's adoption by people, I think it will be a good idea to represent that in a simple graphic.
We have actualy 16700 signed people but no idea of evolution of this number.
I think it wil be easy with the date and the number of signing people at this date.
Regards
Nico