[charleshn]

> Application pods learn the current assignment through a library called the Slicelet (S for server side). The Slicelet maintains a local cache of the latest assignment by fetching it from the Dicer service and watching for updates. When it receives an updated assignment, the Slicelet notifies the application via a listener API.

For a critical control plane component like this, I tend to prefer a constant work pattern [0], to avoid metastable failures [1], e.g. periodically pull the data instead of relying on notifications.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/reliability-and-cons...

[1] https://brooker.co.za/blog/2021/05/24/metastable.html

[jdellithorpe]

The Dicer Slicelet supports such a pattern, you can poll the assignment directly on the Slicelet:

https://github.com/databricks/dicer/blob/master/dicer/extern...

(btw the notification mechanism itself does not deliver the assignment to the application, only notifies the application that the assignment has changed: https://github.com/databricks/dicer/blob/master/dicer/extern...)