what is the difference between netflix zuul server and netflix eureka server? - spring-boot

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

Related

What is the use of Eureka Server in Microservices architecture

I am using "Spring Cloud Gateway" in my microservices application
Ex:
spring.cloud.gateway.routes[0].id=mydemoservice
spring.cloud.gateway.routes[0].uri=http://localhost:8100/
spring.cloud.gateway.routes[0].predicates[0]=Path=/mydemoservice/**
In this case if the request is coming from client like : http://localhost:8100/mydemoservice/api/getdetails
in this case "Spring Cloud Gateway" will route the request to respective service.
But why is Eureka Server required here ? I am not really understanding Eureka Server use here can some please explain.
Best I could find is this medium article which depicts the problems and solutions Eureka provides.
https://medium.com/javarevisited/how-to-use-spring-cloud-gateway-to-dynamically-discover-microservices-194c0c3869c6
This comes to shine when you deploy services with horizontal auto scalability (such as kubernetes). At certain moments, based on the equation you configure (recourse usage, client connections, etc.) the orchestration can and will scale your services (e.g. mydemoservice). It can scale your service instance up to:
the configured max number of instances
until the service usage limit is reached
either way, all of them will have different IP addresses.
Eureka is a discovery/registry service which provides to your gateway information of which cluster/load balancer (IP address) will it pass the request based on Round Robins and such algorithms. The gateway needs to configure all of the services but it will use aliases provided by the Eureka server depicted as such:
https://github.com/rubykv/code-examples/blob/master/gateway/src/main/resources/application.yml
In this example, we see the gateways are configured for services: subject, student, and eureka.
Eureka has a dashboard:
https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*KgT1_hnuXvX6xldyiJJuaQ.png
and will display all eureka clients. To display a service as a eureka client one must implement:
https://github.com/rubykv/code-examples/blob/master/student/pom.xml (netflix eureka and open feign)
annotate application with #EnableFeignClients https://github.com/rubykv/code-examples/blob/master/student/src/main/java/com/example/demo/StudentApplication.java
There are lots of tutorials and articles on medium, I hope this helps for your further investigation.

Api gateway, Service Regisry and Service Mesh, how they work togather?

What I know so far is that:
Api gateway: Is fixed entry point that manage north/south communications.
Service Mesh: Is a side-car proxy that manage inter-service communication east/west.
service registry: Is a database of services, their instances and their locations.
All sound clear, but when I try to put all things together, I am confused:
Most of the service mesh/api gateway vendors say that they provide
access control mechanisms and other similar mechanisms, are these mechanisms an overlapping
functionalities between both concepts, or they have different scope
and goals?
Assume all Api gateway, Service Mesh and Service registry are deployed together:
Does the api gateway forward the request directly to the service, or
it communicate with service proxy?
Do I have to register a service twice, one in the gateway and one in
the service registry? or how to integrate the service registy with api gateway?
Finally Until now it seems for me the all concepts purely serve different purposes so they all necessary, but they overloaded with other functionalities. Is it possible to integrate them in meaningful way? or is there a reference architecture that I can follow?
Because no one posted an answer and based on my continuous reading, I was able to grasp a basic idea of how all components should work together, I will not answer directly to question, rather I will try to make things more clear:
API Gateway or Service Mesh are nothing just proxies, but with that said they are proxies of different types.
API Gateway is a front-proxy or edge-proxy, through it you communicate with the world. so in your architecture you may have an API Gateway running with or without Service Mesh beeing deployed.
To register your services in your Gateway you have two options(maybe more):
Static registration: using configuration file or using the Admin API of the API Gateway you are using, this is similar of how KONG work.
Dynamic registration: usually this is done by integrating your Front-proxy (API Gateway) with some other Service Registry/Discovery tool. you can accomplish that for example using Envoy and consul.io.
Using only Front-proxy (without service mesh) It is hard to do health monitoring, Logging and let all service know if it’s pointless to try to contact a down service(Circuit breaker).
Now, if you need to isolate your services from the topology of the network, or you need to provide a set of functionality around each of your services such as, mentoring, Logging, retries, circuit breaker..etc, then you can accomplish that by deploying a process (beside each service) that proxies all the out and in requests to your service. This process what we call a sidecar proxy. All the sidecars proxies usually run the same code, but they are configured differently.
Finally: The combination of the edge-proxy (API Gateway ) and the sidecar proxies forms what we call a Service Mesh. And obviously all proxies can utilize the same service registry/discovery mechanism.

Kubernetes for securing service endpoints?

So I have a very small micro service architecture built using Eureka service discovery. The problem I am facing right now is that I only want my service endpoints to accept request from my api gateway, as it is right now you can just make a request straight to the service and hit that service endpoint. Is this a problem Kubernetes would solve? Or Is there a more practical way of doing this?
You should be using network policies to control the traffic between the services.
In kubernetes the services you want to expose internally use service type ClusterIP. This is default anyway which means services are accessible within cluster only. your api gateway is exposed as load balancer service type which then takes traffic from external world and talks to services internally. Depending on your cloud provider you can use firewall in front of load balancer since you can compromise security by simply exposing load balancer. e.g. azure kubernetes you could use application gateway. You can also replace the api gateway with ingress controller. it's very powerful reverse proxy controller which you can expose directly to traffic and that would talk to your services internally.
You really need to understand concepts so i would recommend following links
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/
https://blog.getambassador.io/kubernetes-ingress-nodeport-load-balancers-and-ingress-controllers-6e29f1c44f2d

Consul with Spring Cloud Gateway - Inter Service Communication

The setup:
I have a set of Spring Boot based microservices that are fronted by Spring Cloud Gateway, meaning every request that comes from UI or external API client first comes to Spring Cloud Gateway and is then forwarded to appropriate microservice.
The routes are configured in Consul, and Spring Cloud Gateway communicates with Consul to get the routes accordingly.
Requirement:
There is a need of some microservices communicating with each other with REST APIs. I would prefer this communication to happen via the Spring Cloud Gateway as well. This will help in reducing multiple services going to Consul for getting other service's details.
This means every service should know Gateway's detail at least. And there can be multiple instances of Gateways as well. How is this dealt with in bigger architectures?
Any example that I look up contains one service using Consul, or Gateway using the consul with one microservice. Couldn't understand how to extrapolate that design to a bigger system.

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).

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