Connectivity Best Practices

Contents

Overview

This topic contains communications service provider (CSP) connectivity best practices recommendations.

Connectivity

Configuration Expectations

All configuration expectations should be reviewed and agreed upon by both software architects and the DevOps team.

CSP Connection Options

The following two CSP to MarketONE connection options can be used.

  1. Public Interface. This is the recommended method. Please see the Security topic for more information.
  2. AWS Direct Connect. This establishes a direct Layer 2 (L2) link to the customer site from AWS.

Note: The MarketONE < - > CSP connectivity plan should be reviewed during initial contract negotiations, and during the final contract sign-off. Some of the solutions may require extra budgeting considerations.

AWS Connectivity

Note: Please refer to the General Best Practices section on the AWS Multiple Data Center HA Network Connectivity website for AWS Connectivity best practices recommendations.

BSS Idempotency

It is possible that a non-idempotent BSS (with the enterprise service bus (ESB) in front, and multiple legacy systems in the backend) might take a very long time to respond to a transaction. In this situation, if an over-the-top (OTT) provider submits a transaction, and is not notified in a reasonable amount of time that it has been successfully processed by the BSS, the OTT might conclude that the transaction has failed. In response to this possibility, an OTT might then retry the same transaction later, only to have the non-idempotent BSS return a duplicate transaction error.

To avoid this situation it is strongly recommended that the CSP BSS be idempotent. This way even if the BSS receives a transaction multiple times from an OTT, it will always return the same outcome.

Retry Mechanism

Requests that come into MarketONE are validated by an API key. Occasionally the validation of the key (as part of the SSL handshake) results in a timeout, thereby returning one of the following 5xx errors back to the client:

Error Description
502 This Bad Gateway error is usually due to improperly configured proxy servers. However, the problem may also arise when there is poor IP communication between back—end computers, when the client's server is overloaded, or when a firewall is functioning improperly.
503 This Service Unavailable error occurs when the server is unable to handle requests due to a temporary overload or due to the server being temporarily closed for maintenance. The error indicates that the server will only temporarily be down.
504 This Gateway Timeout error occurs when a server somewhere along the chain does not receive a timely response from a server further up the chain. The problem is caused entirely by slow communication between upstream computers.

To overcome these occasional connection timeouts, MarketONE recommends that you implement a retry mechanism. Please refer to the AWS Timeouts, Retries, and Backoff with Jitter page for further information.

Revision History

Version Description
2020.03 Added this topic.
2020.04 Added the BSS Idempotency section.
  Added the Retry Mechanism section.
2020.05 Added a link to the Security topic in the CSP Connections Options section.