Horizontal Scaling

The Problem

Horizontal scaling of any real time system can be tricky. Especially when dealing with long lived connections such as WebSockets. Consider the following example, in which Client A is subscribed to a certain event, that is triggered by Client B:

diagram1
Figure 1. Simple subscriptions setup

In the previous example, the server running the GraphQL service, will do the following:

  1. Receive the mutation by Client B.

  2. Run the Cypher Query on Neo4j.

  3. Trigger the subscription event to Client A.

This setup works fine for a single instance of @neo4j/graphql. However, when trying to scale horizontally, by adding more GraphQL servers, we may encounter the following situation:

diagram2
Figure 2. Subscriptions with 2 servers

In this case, Client B is subscribed to one server, however, when Client A triggers the mutation, it queries a different server.

The change happens successfully in the database, and any client connected to the same server will receive the subscription event, however, Client A will not receive any update, as the server it’s connected to will not get notified of any mutation.

This is the behaviour of the single instance plugin provided by the library, so it is not suitable for use in a horizontally scaled environment.

Using PubSub

One solution to this problem, and how @neo4j/graphql is intended to work, is to use a PubSub pattern with an external broker to broadcast events through multiple instances. This can be achieved through subscription plugins.

Following the previous example, using an intermediate broker to broadcast the events across all instances, the infrastructure would look like:

diagram3
Figure 3. Subscriptions with 2 servers and message broker

In this example, the events are as follow:

  1. Client B will query the first server.

  2. The server performs the mutation in the database.

  3. The same server sends an event to the broker.

  4. The broker will then notify every server (broadcast), including the server that originally triggered the event.

  5. Both servers will receive the notification and will trigger any event to their subscribed clients.

You can find examples of usage with supported brokers in plugins.