EIP – Sequential Convoy Integration Pattern (w)

Summary

Sequential Convoy is an integration pattern that is heavily used with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE. Front-end applications that need to push data into Dynamics often need the data to be processed and consumed in a First-in, First-out manner.

Having a single consumer creates a bottleneck, having multiple consumers arranged in a competing consumer integration pattern can create processing challenges

Applications often need to process a sequence of messages in the order they arrive, while still being able to scale out to handle increased load. In a distributed architecture, processing these messages in order is not straightforward, because the workers can scale independently and often pull messages independently, using a Competing Consumers pattern.

For example, an order tracking system receives a ledger containing orders and the relevant operations on those orders. These operations could be to create an order, add a transaction to the order, modify a past transaction, or delete an order. In this system, operations must be performed in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) manner, but only at the order level. However, the initial queue receives a ledger containing transactions for many orders, which may be interleaved.