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Watch your minions!

We have a Sitecore Commerce 9.0.3 implementation where minions play a somewhat more significant role than they were probably initially designed for. They synchronize catalog with PIM, pricing with external price system, promotions with external marketing system, etc. One of the most important roles is pushing the queue of created orders to the fulfillment provider.
Once the order volume passed the initial rate, the fulfillment provider started getting duplicate orders. This was somewhat random, and hard to catch. The duplicate orders would always be sent within less than a second from each other. The minion logs on our side would show no duplicate attempts to send anything, and the code itself made that impossible. To add to the mystery - rebooting the server would fix the issue but only until the next deployment. After much investigation and some lucky coincidence, we've found out the following:
  • Authoring role would suddenly start running minions;
  • The minions in Authoring and Minions roles would run almost simultaneously, trying to grab the same items from the same lists at the same time. If item was not removed from the list immediately after reading, it would be red and processed twice;
  • There were no minions defined for Authoring (besides the standard NodeHeartBeat);
  • Killing and restarting the Authoring node showed no minions configurations loaded.
So how was this happening? By running the Bootstrap. You see, our deployment scripts run Bootstrap against the Authoring role (as the first available). Guess what - running Bootstrap loads all configurations in this node, including minions. And it runs them! Killing the process and letting it re-start creates a "normal" Authoring instance that does not fight your minions.
Such a nice undocumented feature...

By the way, this also immediately cleared our logs from those nasty unexplainable "Entity version supplied is not current..." exceptions.

TL;DR: Running Bootstrap() against a Commerce Engine instance loads all configurations into that instance and might result in duplicate minions running. Once done with Bootstrap - kill that node process with fire. Then restart normally. Or use Ops instance for bootstrap and keep it shut down during the normal operations.
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