Making things asynchronous is a proven way to increase scalability, and yet, many things seem to be naturally synchronous. But does that mean that these problems really are impossible to divide in an asynchronous way, or does that mean that we are simply stuck in particular way of thinking about these types of problems? Udi Dahan challenges this thinking:
Often during my consulting engagements I run into people who say, “some things just can’t be made asynchronous” even after they agree about the inherent scalability that asynchronous communications pattern bring. One often-cited example is user authentication - taking a username and password combo and authenticating it against some back-end store.
In the article Asynchronous, High-Performance Login for Web Farms, Udi shows how to do this differently; how to solve the problem in an asynchronous and more scalable way.