Mitigating Race Conditions Between API Calls in Java Microservices

Race conditions are one of the most relevant problems on distributed systems, especially in microservices architectures. Such problems occur in Java-based microservices when multiple threads or API calls try to access and modify shared resources at the same time without appropriate synchronization. Unfortunately, they can also lead to race conditions that cause unpredictable behavior, data corruption, and even system failures, so they undermine the robustness of microservices-based applications. It discusses different approaches to addressing race conditions in Java microservices, including an overview of the role of locking mechanisms, concurrency control techniques, and transaction isolation levels in preventing race conditions. In this research, we present a comparison of these concurrent programming techniques, weighing their ability to prevent concurrency errors against their system performance. Moreover, this research discusses actionable prevention techniques and application design best practices which developers and system architects can adopt in order to mitigate race condition vulnerabilities in their applications. Thus, the final aim of this research is to contribute towards more reliable and scalable microservices applications by opening up for further work on concurrency management that can provide insights into optimal concurrency management strategies that reduce the likelihood with which race conditions occur in such highly distributed architectures.