UserService might need to become an async task

[begedin]

Problem

Right now, the user service does the following in a single transaction

• updates the user
• updates the associated platform customer record locally
• updates the associated platform customer record on stripe
• updates the associated connect customer records locally (can be multiple)
• updates the associated connect customer records on stripe (can be multiple)

That's a lot of work for a synchronous process. It would make sense to make it an async task.

However, this process is triggered by the user updating their profile, so we do need to update the user record itself immediately, and reply with the updated record to the client.

This means that, in order to make it an async task, we would have to lose the benefits of it being a transaction.

Taking that into consideration, we need to discuss a potential solution (if we need to change anything at all).

One option would be to add a flag to the user database indicating that the account is out of sync with the associated stripe accounts. We could then periodically retry in a background worker of some sort.

Alternatively, a more encompassing solution would be to store background tasks somewhere and retry the failed ones. Really, I'm not sure what the proper way of dealing with this in Elixir would be, compared to Rails.

[joshsmith]

@begedin I'm going to punt on this for the moment because I think it's possible that we lose the need for two different customer records if we move to managed accounts. Not positive, but will investigate.

[joshsmith]

@begedin is this done now?

[begedin]

The problematic part is the same as it was before. When a user get's updated, we need to

• update platform customer account locally and on stripe
• update connect customer accounts locally and on stripe

If we follow the same train of thought was with handling our events, then it would make sense to process parts if not all of it asynchronously. I'm really not sure how we would do that in a speedy and reliable manner, though. If we update all in a transaction asynchronously, then our client will have trouble with confirming the update went through. If we do just parts, then it gets complicated with having to keep things in sync.