Race conditions in REST API's

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I'm currently struggling to wrap my head around some concurrency concepts in general. Suppose we have a REST api with several endpoints for updating and creating entities in our database. Lets assume that we receive 100 concurrent requests at the same time for a certain update. How do we guarantee that our data consistency is retained? If working with Java, I guess some options would be:

  • Using lock mechanisms
  • Using synchronization on methods in our service layer

However surely this would make a huge impact on the scalability of our application? But I can't see any other way currently of ensuring that we don't encounter any race conditions when interacting with our database. (Also I dont think there is much point to adding synchronization to every method we write in our service?)

So, I guess the question is: how can we reliably secure our application from race conditions with concurrent requests, while at the same time retaining scalability?

I realize this is a very open-ended and conceptual question, but please if you can point me in the right direction of what area / topic I should dive into for learning, I would be grateful.

Thanks!

spring-boot concurrency spring database java
1 Answers

You got a good understanding of the problem.

You have to decide between eventual consistency and strong consistency. Strong consistency will limit scaling to a certain extent but you also really need to sit down and be realistic/honest about your scaling needs(or your consistency needs).

It's also possible to limit consistency for example rows in a database could be consistent or you can be consistent geographically within a region or a continent. Different queries can also have different requirements.

Creating efficient and strongly consistent databases is a whole field of research and all the big tech giants have people working on that, there are too many solutions/technologies to list. Just googling something like "strong consistency scaling" will get you a ton of results you can read.

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