Outbox Pattern for Reliable Distributed Systems
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63397/ISCSITR-IJCC_2025_06_06_002Keywords:
Outbox Pattern, Inbox–Outbox Pattern, Event Router Pattern, Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture, Eventual Consistency, Exactly-Once Processing, At-Least-Once Delivery, Distributed Systems, Transactional Integrity, Atomicity, Du-al-Write Problem, Idempotency, Deduplication, Change Data Capture (CDC), Polling, Message Broker, Kafka, Debezium, Database Transaction Log, Write Amplification, Fi-nancial Systems, E-commerce, Serverless ArchitecturesAbstract
Modern distributed systems increasingly rely on asynchronous communication through event streams and message brokers. Ensuring reliable, exactly-once event publication while maintaining transactional integrity across heterogeneous services remains a core challenge. The Outbox Pattern has emerged as a robust architectural mechanism to guarantee atomicity between database state changes and event emission. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the Outbox Pattern, design considerations, implementation strategies, performance implications, and its applicability in cloud-native, microservice-based architectures. It also discusses advanced variants including idempotent consumers, deduplication techniques, and its role within event-driven frameworks.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Akshay Pratinav, Shibashis Mishra (Author)
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