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Service Discovery

Service Discovery#

Question: In microservice environment, how does one service know where the other service is located at?

Service discovery provides:

  • A way for a service to register itself.

  • A way for a service to de-register itself.

  • A way for a client to find other services.

  • A way to check the health of a service and remove unhealthy instances.

Multiple ways to discover services in Spring Cloud:

  • Spring Cloud Consul

  • Spring Cloud Zookeeper

  • Spring Cloud Netflix

Service Discovery Key Components#

Service Discovery components

Service Discovery Flow#

Service Discovery flow

  1. Service Registers

  2. Client looks up service location

  3. Discovery server sends back service location

  4. Client-Service connection is established.

Service Discovery Components: Discovery Server#

  • An actively managed registry for service locations.

  • Source of truth.

  • One or more instances.

Using Spring Cloud Eureka Server#

pom.xml

<dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-cloud-dependencies</artifactId>
      <version>Camden-SR2</version>
      <type>pom</type>
      <scope>import</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

pom.xml

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-eureka-server</artifactId>
</dependency>

application.properties

spring-application.name=my-discovery-server

OR application.yml

spring:
  application:
    name: my-discovery-server

Application.java

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableEurekaServer
public class Application {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
  }
}

Using Spring Cloud Eureka Server:

  • Just add the @EnableEurekaServer on the main class. That’s it, the Eureka discover server is ready and we can start the server application.

  • It will try to register itself with the peer-servers (for high availability we tend to run multiple servers).

    • Which will if there is only one server running.

Configurations:

  • spring.application.name: a unique name for the application

  • eureka.client.register-with-eureka: boolean, means if we want to register self with a peer eureka server.

  • eureka.client.fetch-registry: boolean, if we want to fetch existing registry from a peer discovery server.

  • server.port: default eureka server port is 8761

Service Discovery Components: Application Service#

User of the Service discovery client.

Using Spring Cloud Eureka Client#

pom.xml

<dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-cloud-dependencies</artifactId>
      <version>Camden-SR2</version>
      <type>pom</type>
      <scope>import</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

pom.xml

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-eureka</artifactId>
</dependency>

application.properties

spring-application.name=my-service
eureka.client.service-url.defaultZone=http://localhost:8761/eureka

OR application.yml

spring:
  application:
    name: my-discovery-server
eureka:
  client:
    service-url:
      defaultZone: http://localhost:8761/eureka

Application.java

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableDiscoveryClient
public class Application {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
  }
}

Service discovery logs on both client and server side:

Service discovery logs

Service Discovery Components: Application Client#

  • Calls another application service to implement its functionality.

  • User of discovery client.

NOTE:

  • It makes sense for an application to be both a service and a client.

  • Only difference with service is in the configuration as it has eureka.client.register-with-eureka to false. A Client doesn’t need anybody to discover it!

Discovering Services as a Client: Two Options#

1. Eureka Server Specific:

@Inject
EurekaClient client

2. Discovery Server Agnostic:

/* Spring Discovery Client */

@Inject
DiscoveryClient client

Using the EurekaClient#

InstanceInfo instance =
  eurekaClient.getNextServerFromEureka("service-id", false);

getNextServerFromEureka - pick the next instance using round-robin.

  • 1st argument - virtual hostname or service id of service to call.

    • By default, apps use the spring.application.name as their virtual hostname when registering.

  • 2nd argument - whether or not this is secure request.

Using the DiscoveryClient#

List<ServiceInstance> instances =
  client.getInstances("service-id");

String baseUrl = instances.get(0).getUri().toString();

getInstances - return all instances of the given service id

Eureka Additional#

Eureka Dashboard#

Enabled by default

eureka.dashboard.enabled=true

Displays useful metadata and service status.

Eureka Configuration#

  1. eureka.server.* - EurekaServerConfigBean

  2. eureka.client.* - EurekaClientConfigBean

  3. eureka.instance.* - EurekaInstanceConfigBean

Other Features#

  • Service Health

    • Regularly checks the status of the services.

    • Clients send heartbeats every 30 sec (default).

    • Services removed after 90 sec of no heartbeats (defaults).

    • Can customize configuration to use /health endpoint. eureka.client.healthCheck.enabled

  • The registry is distributed (cached locally on every client).

  • Clients can operate without discovery server.

  • Fetches deltas to update registry.

  • AWS aware

    • AWS-specific instance deltas.

    • Elastic IP bindings.

    • Multi-zone aware.

    • Multi-region aware.

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