Delay Resource startup

[andrew-bauer-calibrated]

I have a project reference that relies on an ArangoDB container, and the ArangoDB service inside the container takes a few moments to became available. Is there a way to delay starting the project until the ArangoDB service is available?

[davidfowl]

No, you need to make the connection to the database resilient (retries etc)

[davidfowl]

You have 10 services and 10 databases? Don't you retry during the migration phase?

[vdurante]

@davidfowl for the local environment I am trying with a single database to make it simpler, so basically 10 services using the same database in 10 different schemas.

I just implemented this timeout functionality from an environment variable and should work well. Thanks for the responses!

[andrew-bauer-calibrated]

@vdurante no I haven't found a better way. No matter where I look, everyone says the same thing when it comes to service dependencies on a distributed system - "handle it with retries".

I'm not a fan of this response because it collapses two concepts together: delayed startup waiting for dependencies and actual outages. In addition to your race conditions issue, accepting this approach means I can't fully trust my logs, as I can't easily distinguish between real outages and startup delays.

I assume this functionality isn't being added into Aspire because the downstream systems (Azure, Kubernetes, etc) don't support it, which is unfortunate as it is obviously needed.

[davidfowl]

This is possible since 9.0 with WaitFor https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals/orchestrate-resources?tabs=docker#waiting-for-resources