Distributed systems are hard. They have a lot of moving parts with complex interactions and are inherently multi-threaded. To make them work, there is often some form of eventual consistency at play. Embracing this can make software development easier.

When working in a distributed system, your overall system is comprised of discrete components which I will call "bounded contexts." Sometimes these bounded contexts have the need to be eventually consistent. In this article we will cover Out of Band Healing, a pattern that can be used to reduce temporal coupling when healing your server-side caches.

When we started on our journey towards bounded contexts, we wanted to maintain the small-team, focused, feel that we had enjoyed with as a single team supporting a monolith. One strategy we adopted was to limit our dependencies between the teams and, by extension, the different bounded contexts. We did not want to introduce temporal runtime coupling between components developed by different teams because that would reduce the autonomy of these teams and limit our ability to develop the products that we wanted to develop in the ways we wanted to develop them.