Handling Memory Pointers in Communication between Microservices

Abstract

When microservices are written from scratch, APIs are usually made stateless. However, when an existing monolith application is decomposed into microservices, it may not be possible to make all the APIs stateless. Therefore, objects transferred via APIs may contain pointers. Consequently, data transfer via an API i.e., from a client address space to a server address space, reconstruction at the server, and returning to the client become non-trivial operations.Conventionally, data transfer between microservices is done using JSON, which serializes pointers to values that they point to. Once the data in JSON reaches the server, deserialization creates objects of the original types on the server. However, deserialization is unable to return the same objects passed by the client because serialization leads to loss of pointer information. We propose to apply pointer swizzling to solve this problem. Pointer swizzling modifies the definition of the class by introducing ID of the object and by replacing all pointers with IDs of the objects it refers. These IDs help to maintain correct reference in the server. After the server API operates on the objects, the server returns new objects of the same types to the client. These new objects need to be plugged back in the client address space i.e., pointers to the old objects in the client need to now point to the corresponding new objects. This plugging back is non-trivial because we do not know how the old objects map to the new objects. We propose creating memory maps at runtime to overcome this challenge.