What to put as discoverable services when using Eureka? - microservices

I am following a course about microservice architecture using spring, covering netflix's eureka.
The clientui serves webpages and calls the 3 microservices when needed.
The config-server serves configuration for the 3 microservices from a git repo.
Of course the 3 microservices are registered as eureka clients.
My questions are :
should the config server and also be registered as an eureka client, or is there no benefit in doing so?
what about the clientui (which is the web entry point) ? can it be registered as an eureka client in order to benefit from load balancing system and if yes, how then should the app be accessed by clients?

About your first question :- Yes you can register config server as eureka client. Benefit of this will be that in terms of service management it will give you a single point of visibility of all the services. Also later if you try to expand your app in terms of distributed architecture and say you implement an api gateway like zuul, it will be easy for you to setup a fallback config server say if one config server goes down requests can be routed to other config server and so on.
About your second question :- Honestly speaking , I didn't understand it very well in first place. I have never seen any ui service registering to eureka so I am not very sure about this. Still if you have more doubts about it , you can let me know like is it a angular ui or is it a http based client or what.

Related

Should services fetch its configuration through gateway or directly through Configuration Server?

I recently have learnt and practicing Microservice using Spring technology. I am currently writing a small program that has Eureka Server, Configuration Server, Gateway and Account service. I have all of my services register its instance to Eureka and have my Gateway gets its configuration from Configuration Server. After that, I got some question, should I my Account Service fetch its configuration directly from Configuration Server, or from Gateway because it can be done in both way. I think, if I decide to fetch it through Gateway, it might be better because Gateway is a load balancer, so in case if there are multiple Configuration Servers out there, I don't need to worry if any of them failed or down as Gateway can handle this for me. But, doing so, isn't I put too much weight on Gateway because it need to handle this and another requests. Furthermore, I am not sure and I can't find any information about if there is a way to load balancing Gateway or is it makes sense to do so?
Please advice and explain. Thank you.
Only user's requests from UI need to be passed via Gateway. Services should be able to fetch their configuration during startup disregarding whether gateway is online or doesn't exist at all.
Also I'd advise you to avoid registering config service in Discovery (Eureka). I suppose there is no need for your users to send requests to config service.
Along with spring cloud config and gateway documentation I'd recommend you to get familiar with these 2 books:
https://www.manning.com/books/enterprise-java-microservices
https://www.manning.com/books/spring-microservices-in-action

which is the best API gateway for micro services using spring?

I am trying to build a simple application with microservices architecture.
Below are the details about 3 microservices I have created.
1] Customer.
database: mongodb
server : embeded tomcat server.
port : 8081
2] vendor.
database: mongodb
server : embeded tomcat server.
port : 8082
3] product.
database: mongodb
server : embeded tomcat server.
port : 8083
All the 3 micros runs on an embeded tomcat server.
Now I want to create a common gateway for all these micros [API gateway].
which help me to route my request based on the request I get for example:-
for example if I get a request of http://hostname:port_of_gateway/customer.
on reading this I need to route the request tom my customer micro and fetch its response and send it back to client.
Which of the spring tool I can use to achieve this?
Because your requirements are quite simple you can implement such a gateway by yourself. Here's an example.
But if you really want to use some Spring solution you can try to use Spring Cloud Netflix which is a part of Spring Cloud umbrella project. It includes router and filter features which in turn based on Netflix Zuul gateway service.
Note that this is not a complete standalone application but a library. Therefore you still should create another microservice that would act as API gateway in your application. To make it a gateway you should just add #EnableZuulProxy annotation to the same class that has #SrpingBootApplication annotation. You can find a very good example here.
Please also note that you should somehow inform the gateway about your microservices' addresses for redirection. It can be done in two general ways:
By statically defining the addresses in gateway microservice's configuration;
By applying service discovery pattern in conjunction with e.g. Netflix Eureka service registry.
The 1st approach is easy and straightforward but is not very well for large number of microservices and/or when microservices' locations can change dynamically (e.g. due to auto-scaling).
The 2nd approach requires additional component - service registry - and needs modification of other microservices (to let them register themselves in the registry). This is quite more complicated approach but is the only possible in case of complex architecture. Simple yet expressive example can be found in the same article.
UPDATE (January'19)
As of December 2018 the Spring Cloud team announced that almost all Netflix components in Spring Cloud (except Eureka) entered maintenance mode. It means that for the next year they won't receive any feature updates (only bugs and security fixes).
There are replacements for all the affected components, including Netflix Zuul aforementioned above. So please consider using Spring Cloud Gateway instead of it in new projects.

what is the difference between netflix zuul server and netflix eureka server?

i have created two java spring-boot micro services they are
1) producer
2) consumer
and i have used spring eureka server for service registration and discovery . it worked fine . then what is the use of Netflix Zuul.
Let's suppose you have 20 services to which user can interact to, and of course we are not going to expose each and every services publicly because that will be madness (because all services will have different ports and context), so the best approach will be to use an API gateway which will act as single entry point access to our application (developed in micro service pattern) and that is where Zuul comes into picture. Zuul act as a reverse proxy to all your micro-services running behind it and is capable of following
Authentication
Dynamic Routing
Service Migration
Load Shedding
Security
Static Response handling
Active/Active traffic management
You can go through documentation here
If you have enough experience in the domain, you could look at zuul as an API gateway like Apigee. It is very feature rich and touches up on a lot of different concerns like routing, monitoring and most importantly, security. And eureka as a service discovery platform that allows you to load balance (in Linux terms the nginx or haproxy) and fail over between your service instances.
Typically the backend services that perform the server side business operations (i.e. core) are not exposed publicly due to many reasons. They are shielded by some Gateway layer that also serves as reverse-proxy. Netflix Zuul serves as this gateway layer which easily gives you the capabilities as mentioned by #Apollo and here

When to configure zuul routes

I am new to spring cloud and going through some examples and material available online to make myself comfortable. However, while reading about ZUUL, some sites configured the routes in ZUUL's application.yml and some other sites mentioned that the requests will be forwarded to the respective microservice and no need to explicitly configure the routes. I was bit confused. For ex, in the below scenario what is the approach, to configure routes or to let zuul route automatically?
Let's say i have few micro services running and all of them along with ZUUL are registered to Eureka.
I have a front end which is running on a different port on the same server and needs to interact with the above micro services.
I also have few other applications (Running entirely on different servers) which need to interact with the above micro services for fetching the data.
TIA..
Did you use Zuul (which know microservices address through Eureka) to forward request between your micro-services ? if it's the case, you are using Server-Side Load Balancing pattern.
If you use a discovery service (Eureka in your case), i think the best approach it's to use Client-Side load balancing pattern for all inter-services requests (inside your system). (you can use Ribbon or RestTemplate for that).
You can use Zuul as a unified front door to your system, which allows a browser, mobile app or other user interface to consume services from multiple hosts without managing cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and authentication for each one.
For example : a client (mobile app) request for all picture comments. The client dont need to know the Comments-service address. Only proxy address needed and Zuul will forward the request to the right service. You can do this in application.yml/.properties by
zuul.routes.comments.path=/comments/**
zuul.routes.comments.service-id=comments
The request will be GET www.myproxy.mycompany.com/comments. Dont forget the service name in your application.yml/.properties is very important (spring.application.name). It's the service-id in Zuul routes (which the same identifier in Eureka).
For some reason, your system need to request external services (as you mentionned in the 3th note). In this case, your external services are not a discovery client, Zuul can't look for the service-id from Eureka. you use routes as
zuul.routes.currencyprovider.path=/currencies/**
zuul.routes.currencyprovider.url=https://currencies.net/
with this route, all /currencies/** requests from your services THROUGH Zuul will be done.
with this approach you have one door for all your system. This is API Gateway pattern.
Sometimes your system need to aggregate multiple results from different services to response to client request. You can do this in Proxy (Zuul in your case).

How to do service discovery for Spring Boot REST endpints

If I have multiple Spring Boot embedded tomcat containers and each can have service endpoints like
http://localhost:8080/employeeSelfService/getDetails
http://localhost:8081/employeeSelfService/getDetails
How can do load balancing using 2 micro services such that clients can hit any of the URL's mentioned based on some load balancing startegy
One option thats come to my mind is to use NetFlix Curator (or) have a apache webserver acting as reverse proxy but with apache, when you create new instances of your services, you will have have an entry of that service as a member in httpd.conf
Does Spring Boot provides any service discovery and load balancing mechanism ?
Spring Boot does not provide this feature, as it is already usually provided by a reverse proxy such as apache/nginx running in front of the Spring Boot server.
See here for an example here how the commercial version of nginx provides the functionality of dynamically scaling and reducing the upstream nodes.
So in this case it's for the dynamic instance, in this case the Spring Boot process to signal it's presence/unregister itself to the upstream server at initialization/shutdown.
See here how to do so in the case of nginx, this procedure will be different from server to server.
Arguably it's not really an application's role to manage its own load-balancing, and Spring Boot focuses on the implementation of an application (or service, equivalently). We have been thinking about whether we could provide features in Spring (Boot or otherwise) to make it easy to write your own load-balancer, or service registry app, but even then I don't think that was what the question was really about (or was it?).
If I interpret the question, and the example use case, literally, I would say that the most natural answer is an out-of-the-box reverse proxy solution (as the other answers pointed out). I also note that such a reverse proxy is an essential and natural part of a PaaS solution, so if you need it to "just work" and don't want to know about the details, PaaS would be a natural path (e.g. see cloudfoundry as an example of such a solution that I happen to have worked on).
Indeed Spring Boot has not inherit support for load-balancing. Just to add to the list of available solutions for load-balancing, here are the instructions to configure an Apache for load-balancing.

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