Paspartu is French for “one size fits all”. Recently I’ve been coming across posts explaining and “promoting” the idea of spawning threads inside a worker role each one of them with a unique work to be done. All are sharing the same idea and all of them are describing the same thing.

The idea

You have some work to do, but you want to do it with the most efficient way, without having underutilized resources, which is one of the benefits of cloud computing anyway.

The implementation

You have a worker process (Worker Role on Windows Azure) which processes some data. Certainly that’s a good implementation but it’s not a best practice. Most of the time, your instance will be underutilized, unless your doing some CPU and memory intensive work and you have a continuous flow of data to be processed.

In another implementation, we created a Master-Slave pattern. A master distributes work to other slave worker roles, roles are picking up their work, do their stuff, return result and start over again. Still, in some cases that’s not the best idea either. Same cons as before. Underutilized resources, high risk of failure. If the master dies, unless properly designed, your system dies. You can’t process any data.

So, another one appeared. Inside a worker role, spawn multiple threads, running their own processes or methods, doing their work and return result. Underutilization is minimized, Thread Pool is doing all the hard work for us and as soon as .NET 4.0 is supported on Windows Azure, parallelization is easy and, allow me to say, mandatory. But what happens if the worker instance dies? Or restarts? Yes, your guess is correct. You lose all threads and all the processing done by that moment, is lost, unless you persist it somehow. If you had multiple instances of your worker role to imitate that behavior, that wouldn’t happen. You’ll only lose data from the instance that died.

As Eugenio Pace says “You have to be prepared to fail” and he’s right. Every single moment, your instance can die, without a single notice and you have to be prepared to deal with it.

Oh, boy.

So really, there is no single solution or best practice. For me, it’s best guidance. Depending on your scenario, one of the solutions above or even a new one, can fit better for you than for others. Every project is unique and has to be treated as such. Try to think out of the box and remember that this is deep water for everyone. It is just some of us swim better..

PK.