Spring Cloud provides tools for developers to quickly build some of the common patterns in distributed systems (e.g. configuration management, service discovery, circuit breakers, intelligent routing, micro-proxy, control bus, one-time tokens, global locks, leadership election, distributed sessions, cluster state). Coordination of distributed systems leads to boiler plate patterns, and using Spring Cloud developers can quickly stand up services and applications that implement those patterns. They will work well in any distributed environment, including the developer’s own laptop, bare metal data centres, and managed platforms such as Cloud Foundry.

Features

Spring Cloud focuses on providing good out of box experience for typical use cases and extensibility mechanism to cover others.

  • Distributed/versioned configuration

  • Service registration and discovery

  • Routing

  • Service-to-service calls

  • Load balancing

  • Circuit Breakers

  • Global locks

  • Leadership election and cluster state

  • Distributed messaging

Cloud Native Applications

Cloud Native is a style of application development that encourages easy adoption of best practices in the areas of continuous delivery and value-driven development. A related discipline is that of building 12-factor Apps in which development practices are aligned with delivery and operations goals, for instance by using declarative programming and management and monitoring. Spring Cloud facilitates these styles of development in a number of specific ways and the starting point is a set of features that all components in a distributed system either need or need easy access to when required.

Many of those features are covered by Spring Boot, which we build on in Spring Cloud. Some more are delivered by Spring Cloud as two libraries: Spring Cloud Context and Spring Cloud Commons. Spring Cloud Context provides utilities and special services for the ApplicationContext of a Spring Cloud application (bootstrap context, encryption, refresh scope and environment endpoints). Spring Cloud Commons is a set of abstractions and common classes used in different Spring Cloud implementations (eg. Spring Cloud Netflix vs. Spring Cloud Consul).

If you are getting an exception due to "Illegal key size" and you are using Sun’s JDK, you need to install the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files. See the following links for more information:

Extract files into JDK/jre/lib/security folder (whichever version of JRE/JDK x64/x86 you are using).

Note
Spring Cloud is released under the non-restrictive Apache 2.0 license. If you would like to contribute to this section of the documentation or if you find an error, please find the source code and issue trackers in the project at {githubmaster}/docs/src/main/asciidoc[github].

Spring Cloud Context: Application Context Services

Spring Boot has an opinionated view of how to build an application with Spring: for instance it has conventional locations for common configuration file, and endpoints for common management and monitoring tasks. Spring Cloud builds on top of that and adds a few features that probably all components in a system would use or occasionally need.

The Bootstrap Application Context

A Spring Cloud application operates by creating a "bootstrap" context, which is a parent context for the main application. Out of the box it is responsible for loading configuration properties from the external sources, and also decrypting properties in the local external configuration files. The two contexts share an Environment which is the source of external properties for any Spring application. Bootstrap properties are added with high precedence, so they cannot be overridden by local configuration.

The bootstrap context uses a different convention for locating external configuration than the main application context, so instead of application.yml (or .properties) you use bootstrap.yml, keeping the external configuration for bootstrap and main context nicely separate. Example:

bootstrap.yml
spring:
  application:
    name: foo
  cloud:
    config:
      uri: ${SPRING_CONFIG_URI:http://localhost:8888}

It is a good idea to set the spring.application.name (in bootstrap.yml or application.yml) if your application needs any application-specific configuration from the server.

You can disable the bootstrap process completely by setting spring.cloud.bootstrap.enabled=false (e.g. in System properties).

Application Context Hierarchies

If you build an application context from SpringApplication or SpringApplicationBuilder, then the Bootstrap context is added as a parent to that context. It is a feature of Spring that child contexts inherit property sources and profiles from their parent, so the "main" application context will contain additional property sources, compared to building the same context without Spring Cloud Config. The additional property sources are:

  • "bootstrap": an optional CompositePropertySource appears with high priority if any PropertySourceLocators are found in the Bootstrap context, and they have non-empty properties. An example would be properties from the Spring Cloud Config Server. See below for instructions on how to customize the contents of this property source.

  • "applicationConfig: [classpath:bootstrap.yml]" (and friends if Spring profiles are active). If you have a bootstrap.yml (or properties) then those properties are used to configure the Bootstrap context, and then they get added to the child context when its parent is set. They have lower precedence than the application.yml (or properties) and any other property sources that are added to the child as a normal part of the process of creating a Spring Boot application. See below for instructions on how to customize the contents of these property sources.

Because of the ordering rules of property sources the "bootstrap" entries take precedence, but note that these do not contain any data from bootstrap.yml, which has very low precedence, but can be used to set defaults.

You can extend the context hierarchy by simply setting the parent context of any ApplicationContext you create, e.g. using its own interface, or with the SpringApplicationBuilder convenience methods (parent(), child() and sibling()). The bootstrap context will be the parent of the most senior ancestor that you create yourself. Every context in the hierarchy will have its own "bootstrap" property source (possibly empty) to avoid promoting values inadvertently from parents down to their descendants. Every context in the hierarchy can also (in principle) have a different spring.application.name and hence a different remote property source if there is a Config Server. Normal Spring application context behaviour rules apply to property resolution: properties from a child context override those in the parent, by name and also by property source name (if the child has a property source with the same name as the parent, the one from the parent is not included in the child).

Note that the SpringApplicationBuilder allows you to share an Environment amongst the whole hierarchy, but that is not the default. Thus, sibling contexts in particular do not need to have the same profiles or property sources, even though they will share common things with their parent.

Changing the Location of Bootstrap Properties

The bootstrap.yml (or .properties) location can be specified using spring.cloud.bootstrap.name (default "bootstrap") or spring.cloud.bootstrap.location (default empty), e.g. in System properties. Those properties behave like the spring.config.* variants with the same name, in fact they are used to set up the bootstrap ApplicationContext by setting those properties in its Environment. If there is an active profile (from spring.profiles.active or through the Environment API in the context you are building) then properties in that profile will be loaded as well, just like in a regular Spring Boot app, e.g. from bootstrap-development.properties for a "development" profile.

Customizing the Bootstrap Configuration

The bootstrap context can be trained to do anything you like by adding entries to /META-INF/spring.factories under the key org.springframework.cloud.bootstrap.BootstrapConfiguration. This is a comma-separated list of Spring @Configuration classes which will be used to create the context. Any beans that you want to be available to the main application context for autowiring can be created here, and also there is a special contract for @Beans of type ApplicationContextInitializer. Classes can be marked with an @Order if you want to control the startup sequence (the default order is "last").

Warning
Be careful when adding custom BootstrapConfiguration that the classes you add are not @ComponentScanned by mistake into your "main" application context, where they might not be needed. Use a separate package name for boot configuration classes that is not already covered by your @ComponentScan or @SpringBootApplication annotated configuration classes.

The bootstrap process ends by injecting initializers into the main SpringApplication instance (i.e. the normal Spring Boot startup sequence, whether it is running as a standalone app or deployed in an application server). First a bootstrap context is created from the classes found in spring.factories and then all @Beans of type ApplicationContextInitializer are added to the main SpringApplication before it is started.

Customizing the Bootstrap Property Sources

The default property source for external configuration added by the bootstrap process is the Config Server, but you can add additional sources by adding beans of type PropertySourceLocator to the bootstrap context (via spring.factories). You could use this to insert additional properties from a different server, or from a database, for instance.

As an example, consider the following trivial custom locator:

@Configuration
public class CustomPropertySourceLocator implements PropertySourceLocator {

    @Override
    public PropertySource<?> locate(Environment environment) {
        return new MapPropertySource("customProperty",
                Collections.<String, Object>singletonMap("property.from.sample.custom.source", "worked as intended"));
    }

}

The Environment that is passed in is the one for the ApplicationContext about to be created, i.e. the one that we are supplying additional property sources for. It will already have its normal Spring Boot-provided property sources, so you can use those to locate a property source specific to this Environment (e.g. by keying it on the spring.application.name, as is done in the default Config Server property source locator).

If you create a jar with this class in it and then add a META-INF/spring.factories containing:

org.springframework.cloud.bootstrap.BootstrapConfiguration=sample.custom.CustomPropertySourceLocator

then the "customProperty" PropertySource will show up in any application that includes that jar on its classpath.

Environment Changes

The application will listen for an EnvironmentChangedEvent and react to the change in a couple of standard ways (additional ApplicationListeners can be added as @Beans by the user in the normal way). When an EnvironmentChangedEvent is observed it will have a list of key values that have changed, and the application will use those to:

  • Re-bind any @ConfigurationProperties beans in the context

  • Set the logger levels for any properties in logging.level.*

Note that the Config Client does not by default poll for changes in the Environment, and generally we would not recommend that approach for detecting changes (although you could set it up with a @Scheduled annotation). If you have a scaled-out client application then it is better to broadcast the EnvironmentChangedEvent to all the instances instead of having them polling for changes (e.g. using the Spring Cloud Bus).

The EnvironmentChangedEvent covers a large class of refresh use cases, as long as you can actually make a change to the Environment and publish the event (those APIs are public and part of core Spring). You can verify the changes are bound to @ConfigurationProperties beans by visiting the /configprops endpoint (normal Spring Boot Actuator feature). For instance a DataSource can have its maxPoolSize changed at runtime (the default DataSource created by Spring Boot is an @ConfigurationProperties bean) and grow capacity dynamically. Re-binding @ConfigurationProperties does not cover another large class of use cases, where you need more control over the refresh, and where you need a change to be atomic over the whole ApplicationContext. To address those concerns we have @RefreshScope.

Refresh Scope

A Spring @Bean that is marked as @RefreshScope will get special treatment when there is a configuration change. This addresses the problem of stateful beans that only get their configuration injected when they are initialized. For instance if a DataSource has open connections when the database URL is changed via the Environment, we probably want the holders of those connections to be able to complete what they are doing. Then the next time someone borrows a connection from the pool he gets one with the new URL.

Refresh scope beans are lazy proxies that initialize when they are used (i.e. when a method is called), and the scope acts as a cache of initialized values. To force a bean to re-initialize on the next method call you just need to invalidate its cache entry.

The RefreshScope is a bean in the context and it has a public method refreshAll() to refresh all beans in the scope by clearing the target cache. There is also a refresh(String) method to refresh an individual bean by name. This functionality is exposed in the /refresh endpoint (over HTTP or JMX).

Note
@RefreshScope works (technically) on an @Configuration class, but it might lead to surprising behaviour: e.g. it does not mean that all the @Beans defined in that class are themselves @RefreshScope. Specifically, anything that depends on those beans cannot rely on them being updated when a refresh is initiated, unless it is itself in @RefreshScope (in which it will be rebuilt on a refresh and its dependencies re-injected, at which point they will be re-initialized from the refreshed @Configuration).

Encryption and Decryption

The Config Client has an Environment pre-processor for decrypting property values locally. It follows the same rules as the Config Server, and has the same external configuration via encrypt.*. Thus you can use encrypted values in the form {cipher}* and as long as there is a valid key then they will be decrypted before the main application context gets the Environment. To use the encryption features in a client you need to include Spring Security RSA in your classpath (Maven co-ordinates "org.springframework.security:spring-security-rsa") and you also need the full strength JCE extensions in your JVM.

If you are getting an exception due to "Illegal key size" and you are using Sun’s JDK, you need to install the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files. See the following links for more information:

Extract files into JDK/jre/lib/security folder (whichever version of JRE/JDK x64/x86 you are using).

Endpoints

For a Spring Boot Actuator application there are some additional management endpoints:

  • POST to /env to update the Environment and rebind @ConfigurationProperties and log levels

  • /refresh for re-loading the boot strap context and refreshing the @RefreshScope beans

  • /restart for closing the ApplicationContext and restarting it (disabled by default)

  • /pause and /resume for calling the Lifecycle methods (stop() and start() on the ApplicationContext)

Spring Cloud Commons: Common Abstractions

Patterns such as service discovery, load balancing and circuit breakers lend themselves to a common abstraction layer that can be consumed by all Spring Cloud clients, independent of the implementation (e.g. discovery via Eureka or Consul).

Spring RestTemplate as a Load Balancer Client

You can use Ribbon indirectly via an autoconfigured RestTemplate when RestTemplate is on the classpath and a LoadBalancerClient bean is defined):

public class MyClass {
    @Autowired
    private RestTemplate restTemplate;

    public String doOtherStuff() {
        String results = restTemplate.getForObject("http://stores/stores", String.class);
        return results;
    }
}

The URI needs to use a virtual host name (ie. service name, not a host name). The Ribbon client is used to create a full physical address. See RibbonAutoConfiguration for details of how the RestTemplate is set up.

Multiple RestTemplate objects

If you want a RestTemplate that is not load balanced, create a RestTemplate bean and inject it as normal. To access the load balanced RestTemplate use the provided `@LoadBalanced Qualifier:

public class MyClass {
    @Autowired
    private RestTemplate restTemplate;

    @Autowired
    @LoadBalanced
    private RestTemplate loadBalanced;

    public String doOtherStuff() {
        return loadBalanced.getForObject("http://stores/stores", String.class);
    }

    public String doStuff() {
        return restTemplate.getForObject("http://example.com", String.class);
    }
}

Ignore Network Interfaces

Sometimes it is useful to ignore certain named network interfaces so they can be excluded from Service Discovery registration (eg. running in a Docker container). A list of regular expressions can be set that will cause the desired network interfaces to be ignored. The following configuration will ignore the "docker0" interface and all interfaces that start with "veth".

application.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    inetutils:
      ignoredInterfaces:
        - docker0
        - veth.*

Spring Cloud Config

Spring Cloud Config provides server and client-side support for externalized configuration in a distributed system. With the Config Server you have a central place to manage external properties for applications across all environments. The concepts on both client and server map identically to the Spring Environment and PropertySource abstractions, so they fit very well with Spring applications, but can be used with any application running in any language. As an application moves through the deployment pipeline from dev to test and into production you can manage the configuration between those environments and be certain that applications have everything they need to run when they migrate. The default implementation of the server storage backend uses git so it easily supports labelled versions of configuration environments, as well as being accessible to a wide range of tooling for managing the content. It is easy to add alternative implementations and plug them in with Spring configuration.

Quick Start

Start the server:

$ cd spring-cloud-config-server
$ mvn spring-boot:run

The server is a Spring Boot application so you can run it from your IDE instead if you prefer (the main class is ConfigServerApplication). Then try it out a client:

$ curl localhost:8888/foo/development
{"name":"development","label":"master","propertySources":[
  {"name":"https://github.com/scratches/config-repo/foo-development.properties","source":{"bar":"spam"}},
  {"name":"https://github.com/scratches/config-repo/foo.properties","source":{"foo":"bar"}}
]}

The default strategy for locating property sources is to clone a git repository (at spring.cloud.config.server.git.uri) and use it to initialize a mini SpringApplication. The mini-application’s Environment is used to enumerate property sources and publish them via a JSON endpoint.

The HTTP service has resources in the form:

/{application}/{profile}[/{label}]
/{application}-{profile}.yml
/{label}/{application}-{profile}.yml
/{application}-{profile}.properties
/{label}/{application}-{profile}.properties

where the "application" is injected as the spring.config.name in the SpringApplication (i.e. what is normally "application" in a regular Spring Boot app), "profile" is an active profile (or comma-separated list of properties), and "label" is an optional git label (defaults to "master".)

The YAML and properties forms are coalesced into a single map, even if the origin of the values (reflected in the "propertySources" of the "standard" form) has multiple sources.

Spring Cloud Config Server pulls configuration for remote clients from a git repository (which must be provided):

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        git:
          uri: https://github.com/spring-cloud-samples/config-repo

Client Side Usage

To use these features in an application, just build it as a Spring Boot application that depends on spring-cloud-config-client (e.g. see the test cases for the config-client, or the sample app). The most convenient way to add the dependency is via a Spring Boot starter org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-config. There is also a parent pom and BOM (spring-cloud-starter-parent) for Maven users and a Spring IO version management properties file for Gradle and Spring CLI users. Example Maven configuration:

pom.xml
<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>1.2.3.RELEASE</version>
    <relativePath /> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
</parent>

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-parent</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.1.RELEASE</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-config</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

<!-- repositories also needed for snapshots and milestones -->

Then you can create a standard Spring Boot application, like this simple HTTP server:

@SpringBootApplication
@RestController
public class Application {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String home() {
        return "Hello World!";
    }

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

}

When it runs it will pick up the external configuration from the default local config server on port 8888 if it is running. To modify the startup behaviour you can change the location of the config server using bootstrap.properties (like application.properties but for the bootstrap phase of an application context), e.g.

spring.cloud.config.uri: http://myconfigserver.com

The bootstrap properties will show up in the /env endpoint as a high-priority property source, e.g.

$ curl localhost:8080/env
{
  "profiles":[],
  "configService:https://github.com/spring-cloud-samples/config-repo/bar.properties":{"foo":"bar"},
  "servletContextInitParams":{},
  "systemProperties":{...},
  ...
}

(a property source called "configService:<URL of remote repository>/<file name>" contains the property "foo" with value "bar" and is highest priority).

Note
the URL in the property source name is the git repository not the config server URL.

Spring Cloud Config Server

The Server provides an HTTP, resource-based API for external configuration (name-value pairs, or equivalent YAML content). The server is easily embeddable in a Spring Boot application using the @EnableConfigServer annotation. So this app is a config server:

ConfigServer.java
@SpringBootApplication
@EnableConfigServer
public class ConfigServer {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(ConfigServer.class, args);
  }
}

Like all Spring Boot apps it runs on port 8080 by default, but you can switch it to the conventional port 8888 in various ways. The easiest, which also sets a default configuration repository, is by launching it with spring.config.name=configserver (there is a configserver.yml in the Config Server jar). Another is to use your own application.properties, e.g.

application.properties
server.port: 8888
spring.cloud.config.server.git.uri: file://${user.home}/config-repo

where ${user.home}/config-repo is a git repository containing YAML and properties files.

Note
in Windows you need an extra "/" in the file URL if it is absolute with a drive prefix, e.g. file:///${user.home}/config-repo.
Tip

Here’s a recipe for creating the git repository in the example above:

$ cd $HOME
$ mkdir config-repo
$ cd config-repo
$ git init .
$ echo info.foo: bar > application.properties
$ git add -A .
$ git commit -m "Add application.properties"
Warning
using the local filesystem for your git repository is intended for testing only. Use a server to host your configuration repositories in production.

Environment Repository

Where do you want to store the configuration data for the Config Server? The strategy that governs this behaviour is the EnvironmentRepository, serving Environment objects. This Environment is a shallow copy of the domain from the Spring Environment (including propertySources as the main feature). The Environment resources are parametrized by three variables:

  • {application} maps to "spring.application.name" on the client side;

  • {profile} maps to "spring.active.profiles" on the client (comma separated list); and

  • {label} which is a server side feature labelling a "versioned" set of config files.

Repository implementations generally behave just like a Spring Boot application loading configuration files from a "spring.config.name" equal to the {application} parameter, and "spring.profiles.active" equal to the {profiles} parameter. Precedence rules for profiles are also the same as in a regular Boot application: active profiles take precedence over defaults, and if there are multiple profiles the last one wins (like adding entries to a Map).

Example: a client application has this bootstrap configuration:

bootstrap.yml
spring:
  application:
    name: foo
  profiles:
    active: dev,mysql

(as usual with a Spring Boot application, these properties could also be set as environment variables or command line arguments).

If the repository is file-based, the server will create an Environment from application.yml (shared between all clients), and foo.yml (with foo.yml taking precedence). If the YAML files have documents inside them that point to Spring profiles, those are applied with higher precendence (in order of the profiles listed), and if there are profile-specific YAML (or properties) files these are also applied with higher precedence than the defaults. Higher precendence translates to a PropertySource listed earlier in the Environment. (These are the same rules as apply in a standalone Spring Boot application.)

Git Backend

The default implementation of EnvironmentRepository uses a Git backend, which is very convenient for managing upgrades and physical environments, and also for auditing changes. To change the location of the repository you can set the "spring.cloud.config.server.git.uri" configuration property in the Config Server (e.g. in application.yml). If you set it with a file: prefix it should work from a local repository so you can get started quickly and easily without a server, but in that case the server operates directly on the local repository without cloning it (it doesn’t matter if it’s not bare because the Config Server never makes changes to the "remote" repository). To scale the Config Server up and make it highly available, you would need to have all instances of the server pointing to the same repository, so only a shared file system would work. Even in that case it is better to use the ssh: protocol for a shared filesystem repository, so that the server can clone it and use a local working copy as a cache.

This repository implementation maps the {label} parameter of the HTTP resource to a git label (commit id, branch name or tag). If the git branch or tag name contains a slash ("/") then the label in the HTTP URL should be specified with the special string "(_)" instead (to avoid ambiguity with other URL paths). Be careful with the brackets in the URL if you are using a command line client like curl (e.g. escape them from the shell with quotes '').

Placeholders in Git URI

Spring Cloud Config Server supports a git repository URL with placeholders for the {application} and {profile} (and {label} if you need it, but remember that the label is applied as a git label anyway). So you can easily support a "one repo per application" policy using (for example):

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        git:
          uri: https://github.com/myorg/{application}

or a "one repo per profile" policy using a similar pattern but with {profile}.

Pattern Matching and Multiple Repositories

There is also support for more complex requirements with pattern matching on the application and profile name. The pattern format is a comma-separated list of {application}/{profile} names with wildcards (where a pattern beginning with a wildcard may need to be quoted). Example:

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        git:
          uri: https://github.com/spring-cloud-samples/config-repo
          repos:
            simple: https://github.com/simple/config-repo
            special:
              pattern: special*/dev*,*special*/dev*
              uri: https://github.com/special/config-repo
            local:
              pattern: local*
              uri: file:/home/configsvc/config-repo

If {application}/{profile} does not match any of the patterns, it will use the default uri defined under "spring.cloud.config.server.git.uri". In the above example, for the "simple" repository, the pattern is simple/* (i.e. it only matches one application named "simple" in all profiles). The "local" repository matches all application names beginning with "local" in all profiles (the /* suffix is added automatically to any pattern that doesn’t have a profile matcher).

Note
the "one-liner" short cut used in the "simple" example above can only be used if the only property to be set is the URI. If you need to set anything else (credentials, pattern, etc.) you need to use the full form.

The pattern property in the repo is actually an array, so you can use a YAML array (or [0], [1], etc. suffixes in properties files) to bind to multiple patterns. You may need to do this if you are going to run apps with multiple profiles. Example:

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        git:
          uri: https://github.com/spring-cloud-samples/config-repo
          repos:
            development:
              pattern:
                - */development
                - */staging
              uri: https://github.com/development/config-repo
            staging:
              pattern:
                - */qa
                - */production
              uri: https://github.com/staging/config-repo
Note
Spring Cloud will guess that a pattern containing a profile that doesn’t end in * implies that you actually want to match a list of profiles starting with this pattern (so */staging is a shortcut for ["*/staging", "*/staging,*"]). This is common where you need to run apps in the "development" profile locally but also the "cloud" profile remotely, for instance.

Every repository can also optionally store config files in sub-directories, and patterns to search for those directories can be specified as searchPaths. For example at the top level:

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        git:
          uri: https://github.com/spring-cloud-samples/config-repo
          searchPaths: foo,bar*

In this example the server searches for config files in the top level and in the "foo/" sub-directory and also any sub-directory whose name begins with "bar".

By default the server clones remote repositories when configuration is first requested. The server can be configured to clone the repositories at startup. For example at the top level:

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        git:
          uri: https://git/common/config-repo.git
          repos:
            team-a:
                pattern: team-a-*
                cloneOnStart: true
                uri: http://git/team-a/config-repo.git
            team-b:
                pattern: team-b-*
                cloneOnStart: false
                uri: http://git/team-b/config-repo.git
            team-c:
                pattern: team-c-*
                uri: http://git/team-a/config-repo.git

In this example the server clones team-a’s config-repo on startup before it accepts any requests. All other repositories will not be cloned until configuration from the repository is requested.

To use HTTP basic authentication on the remote repository add the "username" and "password" properties separately (not in the URL), e.g.

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        git:
          uri: https://github.com/spring-cloud-samples/config-repo
          username: trolley
          password: strongpassword

If you don’t use HTTPS and user credentials, SSH should also work out of the box when you store keys in the default directories (~/.ssh) and the uri points to an SSH location, e.g. "git@github.com:configuration/cloud-configuration". The repository is accessed using JGit, so any documentation you find on that should be applicable. HTTPS proxy settings can be set in ~/.git/config or in the same way as for any other JVM process via system properties (-Dhttps.proxyHost and -Dhttps.proxyPort).

Placeholders in Git Search Paths

Spring Cloud Config Server also supports a search path with placeholders for the {application} and {profile} (and {label} if you need it). Example:

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        git:
          uri: https://github.com/spring-cloud-samples/config-repo
          searchPaths: {application}

searches the repository for files in the same name as the directory (as well as the top level). Wildcards are also valid in a search path with placeholders (any matching directory is included in the search).

File System Backend

There is also a "native" profile in the Config Server that doesn’t use Git, but just loads the config files from the local classpath or file system (any static URL you want to point to with "spring.cloud.config.server.native.searchLocations"). To use the native profile just launch the Config Server with "spring.profiles.active=native".

Note
Remember to use the file: prefix for file resources (the default without a prefix is usually the classpath). Just as with any Spring Boot configuration you can embed ${}-style environment placeholders, but remember that absolute paths in Windows require an extra "/", e.g. file:///${user.home}/config-repo
Warning
The default value of the searchLocations is identical to a local Spring Boot application (so [classpath:/, classpath:/config, file:./, file:./config]). This does not expose the application.properties from the server to all clients because any property sources present in the server are removed before being sent to the client.
Tip
A filesystem backend is great for getting started quickly and for testing. To use it in production you need to be sure that the file system is reliable, and shared across all instances of the Config Server.

The search locations can contain placeholders for {application}, {profile} and {label}. In this way you can segregate the directories in the path, and choose a strategy that makes sense for you (e.g. sub-directory per application, or sub-directory per profile).

If you don’t use placeholders in the search locations, this repository also appends the {label} parameter of the HTTP resource to a suffix on the search path, so properties files are loaded from each search location and a subdirectory with the same name as the label (the labelled properties take precedence in the Spring Environment). Thus the default behaviour with no placeholders is the same as adding a search location ending with /{label}/. For example `file:/tmp/config is the same as file:/tmp/config,file:/tmp/config/{label}

Sharing Configiration With All Applications

With file-based (i.e. git, svn and native) repositories, resources with file names in application* are shared between all client applications (so application.properties, application.yml, application-*.properties etc.). You can use resources with these file names to configure global defaults and have them overridden by application-specific files as necessary.

The #_property_overrides[property overrides] feature can also be used for setting global defaults, and with placeholders applications are allowed to override them locally.

Tip
With the "native" profile (local file system backend) it is recommended that you use an explicit search location that isn’t part of the server’s own configuration. Otherwise the application* resources in the default search locations are removed because they are part of the server.

Property Overrides

The Config Server has an "overrides" feature that allows the operator to provide configuration properties to all applications that cannot be accidentally changed by the application using the normal Spring Boot hooks. To declare overrides just add a map of name-value pairs to spring.cloud.config.server.overrides. For example

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        overrides:
          foo: bar

will cause all applications that are config clients to read foo=bar independent of their own configuration. (Of course an application can use the data in the Config Server in any way it likes, so overrides are not enforceable, but they do provide useful default behaviour if they are Spring Cloud Config clients.)

Tip
Normal, Spring environment placeholders with "${}" can be escaped (and resolved on the client) by using backslash ("\") to escape the "$" or the "{", e.g. \${app.foo:bar} resolves to "bar" unless the app provides its own "app.foo". Note that in YAML you don’t need to escape the backslash itself, but in properties files you do, when you configure the overrides on the server.

You can change the priority of all overrides in the client to be more like default values, allowing applications to supply their own values in environment variables or System properties, by setting the flag `

Health Indicator

Config Server comes with a Health Indicator that checks if the configured EnvironmentRepository is working. By default it asks the EnvironmentRepository for an application named app, the default profile and the default label provided by the EnvironmentRepository implementation.

You can configure the Health Indicator to check more applications along with custom profiles and custom labels, e.g.

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      server:
        health:
          repositories:
            myservice:
              label: mylabel
            myservice-dev:
              name: myservice
              profiles: development

You can disable the Health Indicator by setting spring.cloud.config.server.health.enabled=false.

Security

You are free to secure your Config Server in any way that makes sense to you (from physical network security to OAuth2 bearer tokens), and Spring Security and Spring Boot make it easy to do pretty much anything.

To use the default Spring Boot configured HTTP Basic security, just include Spring Security on the classpath (e.g. through spring-boot-starter-security). The default is a username of "user" and a randomly generated password, which isn’t going to be very useful in practice, so we recommend you configure the password (via security.user.password) and encrypt it (see below for instructions on how to do that).

Encryption and Decryption

Important
Prerequisites: to use the encryption and decryption features you need the full-strength JCE installed in your JVM (it’s not there by default). You can download the "Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files" from Oracle, and follow instructions for installation (essentially replace the 2 policy files in the JRE lib/security directory with the ones that you downloaded).

If the remote property sources contain encrypted content (values starting with {cipher}) they will be decrypted before sending to clients over HTTP. The main advantage of this set up is that the property values don’t have to be in plain text when they are "at rest" (e.g. in a git repository). If a value cannot be decrypted it is removed from the property source and an additional property is added with the same key, but prefixed with "invalid." and a value that means "not applicable" (usually "<n/a>"). This is largely to prevent cipher text being used as a password and accidentally leaking.

If you are setting up a remote config repository for config client applications it might contain an application.yml like this, for instance:

application.yml
spring:
  datasource:
    username: dbuser
    password: '{cipher}FKSAJDFGYOS8F7GLHAKERGFHLSAJ'

Encrypted values in a .properties file must not be wrapped in quotes, otherwise the value will not be decrypted:

application.properties
spring.datasource.username: dbuser
spring.datasource.password: {cipher}FKSAJDFGYOS8F7GLHAKERGFHLSAJ

You can safely push this plain text to a shared git repository and the secret password is protected.

The server also exposes /encrypt and /decrypt endpoints (on the assumption that these will be secured and only accessed by authorized agents). If you are editing a remote config file you can use the Config Server to encrypt values by POSTing to the /encrypt endpoint, e.g.

$ curl localhost:8888/encrypt -d mysecret
682bc583f4641835fa2db009355293665d2647dade3375c0ee201de2a49f7bda

The inverse operation is also available via /decrypt (provided the server is configured with a symmetric key or a full key pair):

$ curl localhost:8888/decrypt -d 682bc583f4641835fa2db009355293665d2647dade3375c0ee201de2a49f7bda
mysecret
Tip
If you are testing like this with curl, then use --data-urlencode (instead of -d) or set an explicit Content-Type: text/plain to make sure curl encodes the data correctly when there are special characters ('+' is particularly tricky).

Take the encrypted value and add the {cipher} prefix before you put it in the YAML or properties file, and before you commit and push it to a remote, potentially insecure store.

The /encrypt and /decrypt endpoints also both accept paths of the form /*/{name}/{profiles} which can be used to control cryptography per application (name) and profile when clients call into the main Environment resource.

Note
to control the cryptography in this granular way you must also provide a @Bean of type TextEncryptorLocator that creates a different encryptor per name and profiles. The one that is provided by default does not do this (so all encryptions use the same key).

The spring command line client (with Spring Cloud CLI extensions installed) can also be used to encrypt and decrypt, e.g.

$ spring encrypt mysecret --key foo
682bc583f4641835fa2db009355293665d2647dade3375c0ee201de2a49f7bda
$ spring decrypt --key foo 682bc583f4641835fa2db009355293665d2647dade3375c0ee201de2a49f7bda
mysecret

To use a key in a file (e.g. an RSA public key for encryption) prepend the key value with "@" and provide the file path, e.g.

$ spring encrypt mysecret --key @${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
AQAjPgt3eFZQXwt8tsHAVv/QHiY5sI2dRcR+...

The key argument is mandatory (despite having a -- prefix).

Key Management

The Config Server can use a symmetric (shared) key or an asymmetric one (RSA key pair). The asymmetric choice is superior in terms of security, but it is often more convenient to use a symmetric key since it is just a single property value to configure.

To configure a symmetric key you just need to set encrypt.key to a secret String (or use an enviroment variable ENCRYPT_KEY to keep it out of plain text configuration files).

To configure an asymmetric key you can either set the key as a PEM-encoded text value (in encrypt.key), or via a keystore (e.g. as created by the keytool utility that comes with the JDK). The keystore properties are encrypt.keyStore.* with * equal to

  • location (a Resource location),

  • password (to unlock the keystore) and

  • alias (to identify which key in the store is to be used).

The encryption is done with the public key, and a private key is needed for decryption. Thus in principle you can configure only the public key in the server if you only want to do encryption (and are prepared to decrypt the values yourself locally with the private key). In practice you might not want to do that because it spreads the key management process around all the clients, instead of concentrating it in the server. On the other hand it’s a useful option if your config server really is relatively insecure and only a handful of clients need the encrypted properties.

Creating a Key Store for Testing

To create a keystore for testing you can do something like this:

$ keytool -genkeypair -alias mytestkey -keyalg RSA \
  -dname "CN=Web Server,OU=Unit,O=Organization,L=City,S=State,C=US" \
  -keypass changeme -keystore server.jks -storepass letmein

Put the server.jks file in the classpath (for instance) and then in your application.yml for the Config Server:

encrypt:
  keyStore:
    location: classpath:/server.jks
    password: letmein
    alias: mytestkey
    secret: changeme

Using Multiple Keys and Key Rotation

In addition to the {cipher} prefix in encrypted property values, the Config Server looks for {name:value} prefixes (zero or many) before the start of the (Base64 encoded) cipher text. The keys are passed to a TextEncryptorLocator which can do whatever logic it needs to locate a TextEncryptor for the cipher. If you have configured a keystore (encrypt.keystore.location) the default locator will look for keys in the store with aliases as supplied by the "key" prefix, i.e. with a cipher text like this:

foo:
  bar: `{cipher}{key:testkey}...`

the locator will look for a key named "testkey". A secret can also be supplied via a {secret:…​} value in the prefix, but if it is not the default is to use the keystore password (which is what you get when you build a keytore and don’t specify a secret). If you do supply a secret it is recommended that you also encrypt the secrets using a custom SecretLocator.

Key rotation is hardly ever necessary on cryptographic grounds if the keys are only being used to encrypt a few bytes of configuration data (i.e. they are not being used elsewhere), but occasionally you might need to change the keys if there is a security breach for instance. In that case all the clients would need to change their source config files (e.g. in git) and use a new {key:…​} prefix in all the ciphers, checking beforehand of course that the key alias is available in the Config Server keystore.

Tip
the {name:value} prefixes can also be added to plaintext posted to the /encrypt endpoint, if you want to let the Config Server handle all encryption as well as decryption.

Serving Plain Text

Instead of using the Environment abstraction (or one of the alternative representations of it in YAML or properties format) your applications might need generic plain text configuration files, tailored to their environment. The Config Server provides these through an additional endpoint at /{name}/{profile}/{label}/{path} where "name", "profile" and "label" have the same meaning as the regular environment endpoint, but "path" is a file name (e.g. log.xml). The source files for this endpoint are located in the same way as for the environment endpoints: the same search path is used as for properties or YAML files, but instead of aggregating all matching resources, only the first one to match is returned.

After a resource is located, placeholders in the normal format (${…​}) are resolved using the effective Environment for the application name, profile and label supplied. In this way the resource endpoint is tightly integrated with the environment endpoints. Example, if you have this layout for a GIT (or SVN) repository:

application.yml
nginx.conf

where nginx.conf looks like this:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         ${nginx.server.name};
}

and application.yml like this:

nginx:
  server:
    name: example.com
---
spring:
  profiles: development
nginx:
  server:
    name: develop.com

then the /foo/default/master/nginx.conf resource looks like this:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         example.com;
}

and /foo/development/master/nginx.conf like this:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         develop.com;
}
Note
just like the source files for environment configuration, the "profile" is used to resolve the file name, so if you want a profile-specific file then /*/development/*/logback.xml will be resolved by a file called logback-development.xml (in preference to logback.xml).

Embedding the Config Server

The Config Server runs best as a standalone application, but if you need to you can embed it in another application. Just use the @EnableConfigServer annotation. An optional property that can be useful in this case is spring.cloud.config.server.bootstrap which is a flag to indicate that the server should configure itself from its own remote repository. The flag is off by default because it can delay startup, but when embedded in another application it makes sense to initialize the same way as any other application.

Note
It should be obvious, but remember that if you use the bootstrap flag the config server will need to have its name and repository URI configured in bootstrap.yml.

To change the location of the server endpoints you can (optionally) set spring.cloud.config.server.prefix, e.g. "/config", to serve the resources under a prefix. The prefix should start but not end with a "/". It is applied to the @RequestMappings in the Config Server (i.e. underneath the Spring Boot prefixes server.servletPath and server.contextPath).

If you want to read the configuration for an application directly from the backend repository (instead of from the config server) that’s basically an embedded config server with no endpoints. You can switch off the endpoints entirely if you don’t use the @EnableConfigServer annotation (just set spring.cloud.config.server.bootstrap=true).

Push Notifications and Spring Cloud Bus

Many source code repository providers (like Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket for instance) will notify you of changes in a repository through a webhook. You can configure the webhook via the provider’s user interface as a URL and a set of events in which you are interested. For instance Github will POST to the webhook with a JSON body containing a list of commits, and a header "X-Github-Event" equal to "push". If you add a dependency on the spring-cloud-config-monitor library and activate the Spring Cloud Bus in your Config Server, then a "/monitor" endpoint is enabled.

When the webhook is activated the Config Server will send a RefreshRemoteApplicationEvent targeted at the applications it thinks might have changed. The change detection can be strategized, but by default it just looks for changes in files that match the application name (e.g. "foo.properties" is targeted at the "foo" application, and "application.properties" is targeted at all applications). The strategy if you want to override the behaviour is PropertyPathNotificationExtractor which accepts the request headers and body as parameters and returns a list of file paths that changed.

The default configuration works out of the box with Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket. In addition to the JSON notifications from Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket you can trigger a change notification by POSTing to "/monitor" with a form-encoded body parameters path={name}. This will broadcast to applications matching the "{name}" pattern (can contain wildcards).

Note
the RefreshRemoteApplicationEvent will only be transmitted if the spring-cloud-bus is activated in the Config Server and in the client application.
Note
the default configuration also detects filesystem changes in local git repositories (the webhook is not used in that case but as soon as you edit a config file a refresh will be broadcast).

Spring Cloud Config Client

A Spring Boot application can take immediate advantage of the Spring Config Server (or other external property sources provided by the application developer), and it will also pick up some additional useful features related to Environment change events.

Config First Bootstrap

This is the default behaviour for any application which has the Spring Cloud Config Client on the classpath. When a config client starts up it binds to the Config Server (via the bootstrap configuration property spring.cloud.config.uri) and initializes Spring Environment with remote property sources.

The net result of this is that all client apps that want to consume the Config Server need a bootstrap.yml (or an environment variable) with the server address in spring.cloud.config.uri (defaults to "http://localhost:8888").

Eureka First Bootstrap

If you are using Spring Cloud Netflix and Eureka Service Discovery, then you can have the Config Server register with Eureka if you want to, but in the default "Config First" mode, clients won’t be able to take advantage of the registration.

If you prefer to use Eureka to locate the Config Server, you can do that by setting spring.cloud.config.discovery.enabled=true (default "false"). The net result of that is that client apps all need a bootstrap.yml (or an environment variable) with the Eureka server address, e.g. in eureka.client.serviceUrl.defaultZone. The price for using this option is an extra network round trip on start up to locate the service registration. The benefit is that the Config Server can change its co-ordinates, as long as Eureka is a fixed point. The default service id is "CONFIGSERVER" but you can change that on the client with spring.cloud.config.discovery.serviceId (and on the server in the usual way for a service, e.g. by setting spring.application.name).

The discovery client implementations all support some kind of metadata map (e.g. for Eureka we have eureka.instance.metadataMap). Some additional properties of the Config Server may need to be configured in its service registration metadata so that clients can connect correctly. If the Config Server is secured with HTTP Basic you can configure the credentials as "username" and "password". And if the Config Server has a context path you can set "configPath". Example, for a Config Server that is a Eureka client:

bootstrap.yml
eureka:
  instance:
    ...
    metadataMap:
      username: osufhalskjrtl
      password: lviuhlszvaorhvlo5847
      configPath: /config

Config Client Fail Fast

In some cases, it may be desirable to fail startup of a service if it cannot connect to the Config Server. If this is the desired behavior, set the bootstrap configuration property spring.cloud.config.failFast=true and the client will halt with an Exception.

Config Client Retry

If you expect that the config server may occasionally be unavailable when your app starts, you can ask it to keep trying after a failure. First you need to set spring.cloud.config.failFast=true, and then you need to add spring-retry and spring-boot-starter-aop to your classpath. The default behaviour is to retry 6 times with an initial backoff interval of 1000ms and an exponential multiplier of 1.1 for subsequent backoffs. You can configure these properties (and others) using spring.cloud.config.retry.* configuration properties.

Tip
To take full control of the retry add a @Bean of type RetryOperationsInterceptor with id "configServerRetryInterceptor". Spring Retry has a RetryInterceptorBuilder that makes it easy to create one.

Locating Remote Configuration Resources

The Config Service serves property sources from /{name}/{profile}/{label}, where the default bindings in the client app are

  • "name" = ${spring.application.name}

  • "profile" = ${spring.profiles.active} (actually Environment.getActiveProfiles())

  • "label" = "master"

All of them can be overridden by setting spring.cloud.config.* (where * is "name", "profile" or "label"). The "label" is useful for rolling back to previous versions of configuration; with the default Config Server implementation it can be a git label, branch name or commit id. Label can also be provided as a comma-separated list, in which case the items in the list are tried on-by-one until one succeeds. This can be useful when working on a feature branch, for instance, when you might want to align the config label with your branch, but make it optional (e.g. spring.cloud.config.label=myfeature,develop).

Security

If you use HTTP Basic security on the server then clients just need to know the password (and username if it isn’t the default). You can do that via the config server URI, or via separate username and password properties, e.g.

bootstrap.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    config:
     uri: https://user:secret@myconfig.mycompany.com

or

bootstrap.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    config:
     uri: https://myconfig.mycompany.com
     username: user
     password: secret

The spring.cloud.config.password and spring.cloud.config.username values override anything that is provided in the URI.

If you deploy your apps on Cloud Foundry then the best way to provide the password is through service credentials, e.g. in the URI, since then it doesn’t even need to be in a config file. An example which works locally and for a user-provided service on Cloud Foundry named "configserver":

bootstrap.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    config:
     uri: ${vcap.services.configserver.credentials.uri:http://user:password@localhost:8888}

If you use another form of security you might need to provide a RestTemplate to the ConfigServicePropertySourceLocator (e.g. by grabbing it in the bootstrap context and injecting one).

Spring Cloud Netflix

This project provides Netflix OSS integrations for Spring Boot apps through autoconfiguration and binding to the Spring Environment and other Spring programming model idioms. With a few simple annotations you can quickly enable and configure the common patterns inside your application and build large distributed systems with battle-tested Netflix components. The patterns provided include Service Discovery (Eureka), Circuit Breaker (Hystrix), Intelligent Routing (Zuul) and Client Side Load Balancing (Ribbon).

Service Discovery: Eureka Clients

Service Discovery is one of the key tenets of a microservice based architecture. Trying to hand configure each client or some form of convention can be very difficult to do and can be very brittle. Eureka is the Netflix Service Discovery Server and Client. The server can be configured and deployed to be highly available, with each server replicating state about the registered services to the others.

Registering with Eureka

When a client registers with Eureka, it provides meta-data about itself such as host and port, health indicator URL, home page etc. Eureka receives heartbeat messages from each instance belonging to a service. If the heartbeat fails over a configurable timetable, the instance is normally removed from the registry.

Example eureka client:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@EnableEurekaClient
@RestController
public class Application {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String home() {
        return "Hello world";
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new SpringApplicationBuilder(Application.class).web(true).run(args);
    }

}

(i.e. utterly normal Spring Boot app). In this example we use @EnableEurekaClient explicitly, but with only Eureka available you could also use @EnableDiscoveryClient. Configuration is required to locate the Eureka server. Example:

application.yml
eureka:
  client:
    serviceUrl:
      defaultZone: http://localhost:8761/eureka/

where "defaultZone" is a magic string fallback value that provides the service URL for any client that doesn’t express a preference (i.e. it’s a useful default).

The default application name (service ID), virtual host and non-secure port, taken from the Environment, are ${spring.application.name}, ${spring.application.name} and ${server.port} respectively.

@EnableEurekaClient makes the app into both a Eureka "instance" (i.e. it registers itself) and a "client" (i.e. it can query the registry to locate other services). The instance behaviour is driven by eureka.instance.* configuration keys, but the defaults will be fine if you ensure that your application has a spring.application.name (this is the default for the Eureka service ID, or VIP).

See EurekaInstanceConfigBean and EurekaClientConfigBean for more details of the configurable options.

Status Page and Health Indicator

The status page and health indicators for a Eureka instance default to "/info" and "/health" respectively, which are the default locations of useful endpoints in a Spring Boot Actuator application. You need to change these, even for an Actuator application if you use a non-default context path or servlet path (e.g. server.servletPath=/foo) or management endpoint path (e.g. management.contextPath=/admin). Example:

application.yml
eureka:
  instance:
    statusPageUrlPath: ${management.context-path}/info
    healthCheckUrlPath: ${management.context-path}/health

These links show up in the metadata that is consumed by clients, and used in some scenarios to decide whether to send requests to your application, so it’s helpful if they are accurate.

Registering a Secure Application

If your app wants to be contacted over HTTPS you can set two flags in the EurekaInstanceConfig, viz eureka.instance.[nonSecurePortEnabled,securePortEnabled]=[false,true] respectively. This will make Eureka publish instance information showing an explicit preference for secure communication. The Spring Cloud DiscoveryClient will always return an https://…​; URI for a service configured this way, and the Eureka (native) instance information will have a secure health check URL.

Because of the way Eureka works internally, it will still publish a non-secure URL for status and home page unless you also override those explicitly. You can use placeholders to configure the eureka instance urls, e.g.

application.yml
eureka:
  instance:
    statusPageUrl: https://${eureka.hostname}/info
    healthCheckUrl: https://${eureka.hostname}/health
    homePageUrl: https://${eureka.hostname}/

(Note that ${eureka.hostname} is a native placeholder only available in later versions of Eureka. You could achieve the same thing with Spring placeholders as well, e.g. using ${eureka.instance.hostName}.)

Note
If your app is running behind a proxy, and the SSL termination is in the proxy (e.g. if you run in Cloud Foundry or other platforms as a service) then you will need to ensure that the proxy "forwarded" headers are intercepted and handled by the application. An embedded Tomcat container in a Spring Boot app does this automatically if it has explicit configuration for the 'X-Forwarded-\*` headers. A sign that you got this wrong will be that the links rendered by your app to itself will be wrong (the wrong host, port or protocol).

Eureka’s Health Checks

By default, Eureka uses the client heartbeat to determine if a client is up. Unless specified otherwise the Discovery Client will not propagate the current health check status of the application per the Spring Boot Actuator. Which means that after successful registration Eureka will always announce that the application is in 'UP' state. This behaviour can be altered by enabling Eureka health checks, which results in propagating application status to Eureka. As a consequence every other application won’t be sending traffic to application in state other then 'UP'.

application.yml
eureka:
  client:
    healthcheck:
      enabled: true

If you require more control over the health checks, you may consider implementing your own com.netflix.appinfo.HealthCheckHandler.

Eureka Metadata for Instances and Clients

It’s worth spending a bit of time understanding how the Eureka metadata works, so you can use it in a way that makes sense in your platform. There is standard metadata for things like hostname, IP address, port numbers, status page and health check. These are published in the service registry and used by clients to contact the services in a straightforward way. Additional metadata can be added to the instance registration in the eureka.instance.metadataMap, and this will be accessible in the remote clients, but in general will not change the behaviour of the client, unless it is made aware of the meaning of the metadata. There are a couple of special cases described below where Spring Cloud already assigns meaning to the metadata map.

Using Eureka on Cloudfoundry

Cloudfoundry has a global router so that all instances of the same app have the same hostname (it’s the same in other PaaS solutions with a similar architecture). This isn’t necessarily a barrier to using Eureka, but if you use the router (recommended, or even mandatory depending on the way your platform was set up), you need to explicitly set the hostname and port numbers (secure or non-secure) so that they use the router. You might also want to use instance metadata so you can distinguish between the instances on the client (e.g. in a custom load balancer). By default, the eureka.instance.instanceId is vcap.application.instance_id. For example:

application.yml
eureka:
  instance:
    hostname: ${vcap.application.uris[0]}
    nonSecurePort: 80

Depending on the way the security rules are set up in your Cloudfoundry instance, you might be able to register and use the IP address of the host VM for direct service-to-service calls. This feature is not (yet) available on Pivotal Web Services (PWS).

Using Eureka on AWS

If the application is planned to be deployed to an AWS cloud, then the Eureka instance will have to be configured to be Amazon aware and this can be done by customizing the EurekaInstanceConfigBean the following way:

@Bean
@Profile("!default")
public EurekaInstanceConfigBean eurekaInstanceConfig() {
  EurekaInstanceConfigBean b = new EurekaInstanceConfigBean();
  AmazonInfo info = AmazonInfo.Builder.newBuilder().autoBuild("eureka");
  b.setDataCenterInfo(info);
  return b;
}

Changing the Eureka Instance ID

A vanilla Netflix Eureka instance is registered with an ID that is equal to its host name (i.e. only one service per host). Spring Cloud Eureka provides a sensible default that looks like this: ${spring.cloud.client.hostname}:${spring.application.name}:${spring.application.instance_id:${server.port}}}. For example myhost:myappname:8080.

Using Spring Cloud you can override this by providing a unique identifier in eureka.instance.instanceId. For example:

application.yml
eureka:
  instance:
    instanceId: ${spring.application.name}:${spring.application.instance_id:${random.value}}

With this metadata, and multiple service instances deployed on localhost, the random value will kick in there to make the instance unique. In Cloudfoundry the spring.application.instance_id will be populated automatically in a Spring Boot Actuator application, so the random value will not be needed.

Using the EurekaClient

Once you have an app that is @EnableDiscoveryClient (or @EnableEurekaClient) you can use it to discover service instances from the Eureka Server. One way to do that is to use the native com.netflix.discovery.EurekaClient (as opposed to the Spring Cloud DiscoveryClient), e.g.

@Autowired
private EurekaClient discoveryClient;

public String serviceUrl() {
    InstanceInfo instance = discoveryClient.getNextServerFromEureka("STORES", false);
    return instance.getHomePageUrl();
}
Tip

Don’t use the EurekaClient in @PostConstruct method or in a @Scheduled method (or anywhere where the ApplicationContext might not be started yet). It is initialized in a SmartLifecycle (with phase=0) so the earliest you can rely on it being available is in another SmartLifecycle with higher phase.

Alternatives to the native Netflix EurekaClient

You don’t have to use the raw Netflix EurekaClient and usually it is more convenient to use it behind a wrapper of some sort. Spring Cloud has support for Feign (a REST client builder) and also Spring RestTemplate using the logical Eureka service identifiers (VIPs) instead of physical URLs. To configure Ribbon with a fixed list of physical servers you can simply set <client>.ribbon.listOfServers to a comma-separated list of physical addresses (or hostnames), where <client> is the ID of the client.

You can also use the org.springframework.cloud.client.discovery.DiscoveryClient which provides a simple API for discovery clients that is not specific to Netflix, e.g.

@Autowired
private DiscoveryClient discoveryClient;

public String serviceUrl() {
    List<ServiceInstance> list = client.getInstances("STORES");
    if (list != null && list.size() > 0 ) {
        return list.get(0).getUri();
    }
    return null;
}

Why is it so Slow to Register a Service?

Being an instance also involves a periodic heartbeat to the registry (via the client’s serviceUrl) with default duration 30 seconds. A service is not available for discovery by clients until the instance, the server and the client all have the same metadata in their local cache (so it could take 3 hearbeats). You can change the period using eureka.instance.leaseRenewalIntervalInSeconds and this will speed up the process of getting clients connected to other services. In production it’s probably better to stick with the default because there are some computations internally in the server that make assumptions about the lease renewal period.

Service Discovery: Eureka Server

Example eureka server (e.g. using spring-cloud-starter-eureka-server to set up the classpath):

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableEurekaServer
public class Application {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new SpringApplicationBuilder(Application.class).web(true).run(args);
    }

}

The server has a home page with a UI, and HTTP API endpoints per the normal Eureka functionality under /eureka/*.

Eureka background reading: see flux capacitor and google group discussion.

Tip

Due to Gradle’s dependency resolution rules and the lack of a parent bom feature, simply depending on spring-cloud-starter-eureka-server can cause failures on application startup. To remedy this the Spring dependency management plugin must be added and the Spring cloud starter parent bom must be imported like so:

build.gradle
buildscript {
  dependencies {
    classpath "io.spring.gradle:dependency-management-plugin:0.4.0.RELEASE"
  }
}

apply plugin: "io.spring.dependency-management"

dependencyManagement {
  imports {
    mavenBom 'org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-parent:1.0.0.RELEASE'
  }
}

High Availability, Zones and Regions

The Eureka server does not have a backend store, but the service instances in the registry all have to send heartbeats to keep their registrations up to date (so this can be done in memory). Clients also have an in-memory cache of eureka registrations (so they don’t have to go to the registry for every single request to a service).

By default every Eureka server is also a Eureka client and requires (at least one) service URL to locate a peer. If you don’t provide it the service will run and work, but it will shower your logs with a lot of noise about not being able to register with the peer.

See also below for details of Ribbon support on the client side for Zones and Regions.

Standalone Mode

The combination of the two caches (client and server) and the heartbeats make a standalone Eureka server fairly resilient to failure, as long as there is some sort of monitor or elastic runtime keeping it alive (e.g. Cloud Foundry). In standalone mode, you might prefer to switch off the client side behaviour, so it doesn’t keep trying and failing to reach its peers. Example:

application.yml (Standalone Eureka Server)
server:
  port: 8761

eureka:
  instance:
    hostname: localhost
  client:
    registerWithEureka: false
    fetchRegistry: false
    serviceUrl:
      defaultZone: http://${eureka.instance.hostname}:${server.port}/eureka/

Notice that the serviceUrl is pointing to the same host as the local instance.

Peer Awareness

Eureka can be made even more resilient and available by running multiple instances and asking them to register with each other. In fact, this is the default behaviour, so all you need to do to make it work is add a valid serviceUrl to a peer, e.g.

application.yml (Two Peer Aware Eureka Servers)
---
spring:
  profiles: peer1
eureka:
  instance:
    hostname: peer1
  client:
    serviceUrl:
      defaultZone: http://peer2/eureka/

---
spring:
  profiles: peer2
eureka:
  instance:
    hostname: peer2
  client:
    serviceUrl:
      defaultZone: http://peer1/eureka/

In this example we have a YAML file that can be used to run the same server on 2 hosts (peer1 and peer2), by running it in different Spring profiles. You could use this configuration to test the peer awareness on a single host (there’s not much value in doing that in production) by manipulating /etc/hosts to resolve the host names. In fact, the eureka.instance.hostname is not needed if you are running on a machine that knows its own hostname (it is looked up using java.net.InetAddress by default).

You can add multiple peers to a system, and as long as they are all connected to each other by at least one edge, they will synchronize the registrations amongst themselves. If the peers are physically separated (inside a data centre or between multiple data centres) then the system can in principle survive split-brain type failures.

Prefer IP Address

In some cases, it is preferable for Eureka to advertise the IP Adresses of services rather than the hostname. Set eureka.instance.preferIpAddress to true and when the application registers with eureka, it will use its IP Address rather than its hostname.

Circuit Breaker: Hystrix Clients

Netflix has created a library called Hystrix that implements the circuit breaker pattern. In a microservice architecture it is common to have multiple layers of service calls.

HystrixGraph
Figure 1. Microservice Graph

A service failure in the lower level of services can cause cascading failure all the way up to the user. When calls to a particular service reach a certain threshold (20 failures in 5 seconds is the default in Hystrix), the circuit opens and the call is not made. In cases of error and an open circuit a fallback can be provided by the developer.

HystrixFallback
Figure 2. Hystrix fallback prevents cascading failures

Having an open circuit stops cascading failures and allows overwhelmed or failing services time to heal. The fallback can be another Hystrix protected call, static data or a sane empty value. Fallbacks may be chained so the first fallback makes some other business call which in turn falls back to static data.

Example boot app:

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableCircuitBreaker
public class Application {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new SpringApplicationBuilder(Application.class).web(true).run(args);
    }

}

@Component
public class StoreIntegration {

    @HystrixCommand(fallbackMethod = "defaultStores")
    public Object getStores(Map<String, Object> parameters) {
        //do stuff that might fail
    }

    public Object defaultStores(Map<String, Object> parameters) {
        return /* something useful */;
    }
}

The @HystrixCommand is provided by a Netflix contrib library called "javanica". Spring Cloud automatically wraps Spring beans with that annotation in a proxy that is connected to the Hystrix circuit breaker. The circuit breaker calculates when to open and close the circuit, and what to do in case of a failure.

To configure the @HystrixCommand you can use the commandProperties attribute with a list of @HystrixProperty annotations. See here for more details. See the Hystrix wiki for details on the properties available.

Propagating the Security Context or using Spring Scopes

If you want some thread local context to propagate into a @HystrixCommand the default declaration will not work because it executes the command in a thread pool (in case of timeouts). You can switch Hystrix to use the same thread as the caller using some configuration, or directly in the annotation, by asking it to use a different "Isolation Strategy". For example:

@HystrixCommand(fallbackMethod = "stubMyService",
    commandProperties = {
      @HystrixProperty(name="execution.isolation.strategy", value="SEMAPHORE")
    }
)
...

The same thing applies if you are using @SessionScope or @RequestScope. You will know when you need to do this because of a runtime exception that says it can’t find the scoped context.

Health Indicator

The state of the connected circuit breakers are also exposed in the /health endpoint of the calling application.

{
    "hystrix": {
        "openCircuitBreakers": [
            "StoreIntegration::getStoresByLocationLink"
        ],
        "status": "CIRCUIT_OPEN"
    },
    "status": "UP"
}

Hystrix Metrics Stream

To enable the Hystrix metrics stream include a dependency on spring-boot-starter-actuator. This will expose the /hystrix.stream as a management endpoint.

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
    </dependency>

Circuit Breaker: Hystrix Dashboard

One of the main benefits of Hystrix is the set of metrics it gathers about each HystrixCommand. The Hystrix Dashboard displays the health of each circuit breaker in an efficient manner.

Hystrix
Figure 3. Hystrix Dashboard

To run the Hystrix Dashboard annotate your Spring Boot main class with @EnableHystrixDashboard. You then visit /hystrix and point the dashboard to an individual instances /hystrix.stream endpoint in a Hystrix client application.

Turbine

Looking at an individual instances Hystrix data is not very useful in terms of the overall health of the system. Turbine is an application that aggregates all of the relevant /hystrix.stream endpoints into a combined /turbine.stream for use in the Hystrix Dashboard. Individual instances are located via Eureka. Running Turbine is as simple as annotating your main class with the @EnableTurbine annotation (e.g. using spring-cloud-starter-turbine to set up the classpath). All of the documented configuration properties from the Turbine 1 wiki apply. The only difference is that the turbine.instanceUrlSuffix does not need the port prepended as this is handled automatically unless turbine.instanceInsertPort=false.

The configuration key turbine.appConfig is a list of eureka serviceIds that turbine will use to lookup instances. The turbine stream is then used in the Hystrix dashboard using a url that looks like: http://my.turbine.sever:8080/turbine.stream?cluster=<CLUSTERNAME>; (the cluster parameter can be omitted if the name is "default"). The cluster parameter must match an entry in turbine.aggregator.clusterConfig. Values returned from eureka are uppercase, thus we expect this example to work if there is an app registered with Eureka called "customers":

turbine:
  aggregator:
    clusterConfig: CUSTOMERS
  appConfig: customers

The clusterName can be customized by a SPEL expression in turbine.clusterNameExpression with root an instance of InstanceInfo. The default value is appName, which means that the Eureka serviceId ends up as the cluster key (i.e. the InstanceInfo for customers has an appName of "CUSTOMERS"). A different example would be turbine.clusterNameExpression=aSGName, which would get the cluster name from the AWS ASG name. Another example:

turbine:
  aggregator:
    clusterConfig: SYSTEM,USER
  appConfig: customers,stores,ui,admin
  clusterNameExpression: metadata['cluster']

In this case, the cluster name from 4 services is pulled from their metadata map, and is expected to have values that include "SYSTEM" and "USER".

To use the "default" cluster for all apps you need a string literal expression (with single quotes):

turbine:
  appConfig: customers,stores
  clusterNameExpression: 'default'

Spring Cloud provides a spring-cloud-starter-turbine that has all the dependencies you need to get a Turbine server running. Just create a Spring Boot application and annotate it with @EnableTurbine.

Turbine AMQP

In some environments (e.g. in a PaaS setting), the classic Turbine model of pulling metrics from all the distributed Hystrix commands doesn’t work. In that case you might want to have your Hystrix commands push metrics to Turbine, and Spring Cloud enables that with AMQP messaging. All you need to do on the client is add a dependency to spring-cloud-netflix-hystrix-amqp and make sure there is a Rabbit broker available (see Spring Boot documentation for details on how to configure the client credentials, but it should work out of the box for a local broker or in Cloud Foundry).

On the server side Just create a Spring Boot application and annotate it with @EnableTurbineAmqp and by default it will come up on port 8989 (point your Hystrix dashboard to that port, any path). You can customize the port using either server.port or turbine.amqp.port. If you have spring-boot-starter-web and spring-boot-starter-actuator on the classpath as well, then you can open up the Actuator endpoints on a separate port (with Tomcat by default) by providing a management.port which is different.

You can then point the Hystrix Dashboard to the Turbine AMQP Server instead of individual Hystrix streams. If Turbine AMQP is running on port 8989 on myhost, then put http://myhost:8989 in the stream input field in the Hystrix Dashboard. Circuits will be prefixed by their respective serviceId, followed by a dot, then the circuit name.

Spring Cloud provides a spring-cloud-starter-turbine-amqp that has all the dependencies you need to get a Turbine AMQP server running. You need Java 8 to run the app because it is Netty-based.

Customizing the AMQP ConnectionFactory

If you are using AMQP there needs to be a ConnectionFactory (from Spring Rabbit) in the application context. If there is a single ConnectionFactory it will be used, or if there is a one qualified as @HystrixConnectionFactory (on the client) and @TurbineConnectionFactory (on the server) it will be preferred over others, otherwise the @Primary one will be used. If there are multiple unqualified connection factories there will be an error.

Note that Spring Boot (as of 1.2.2) creates a ConnectionFactory that is not @Primary, so if you want to use one connection factory for the bus and another for business messages, you need to create both, and annotate them @*ConnectionFactory and @Primary respectively.

Client Side Load Balancer: Ribbon

Ribbon is a client side load balancer which gives you a lot of control over the behaviour of HTTP and TCP clients. Feign already uses Ribbon, so if you are using @FeignClient then this section also applies.

A central concept in Ribbon is that of the named client. Each load balancer is part of an ensemble of components that work together to contact a remote server on demand, and the ensemble has a name that you give it as an application developer (e.g. using the @FeignClient annotation). Spring Cloud creates a new ensemble as an ApplicationContext on demand for each named client using RibbonClientConfiguration. This contains (amongst other things) an ILoadBalancer, a RestClient, and a ServerListFilter.

Customizing the Ribbon Client

You can configure some bits of a Ribbon client using external properties in <client>.ribbon.*, which is no different than using the Netflix APIs natively, except that you can use Spring Boot configuration files. The native options can be inspected as static fields in CommonClientConfigKey (part of ribbon-core).

Spring Cloud also lets you take full control of the client by declaring additional configuration (on top of the RibbonClientConfiguration) using @RibbonClient. Example:

@Configuration
@RibbonClient(name = "foo", configuration = FooConfiguration.class)
public class TestConfiguration {
}

In this case the client is composed from the components already in RibbonClientConfiguration together with any in FooConfiguration (where the latter generally will override the former).

Warning
The FooConfiguration has to be @Configuration but take care that it is not in a @ComponentScan for the main application context, otherwise it will be shared by all the @RibbonClients. If you use @ComponentScan (or @SpringBootApplication) you need to take steps to avoid it being included (for instance put it in a separate, non-overlapping package, or specify the packages to scan explicitly in the @ComponentScan).

Spring Cloud Netflix provides the following beans by default for ribbon (BeanType beanName: ClassName):

  • IClientConfig ribbonClientConfig: DefaultClientConfigImpl

  • IRule ribbonRule: ZoneAvoidanceRule

  • IPing ribbonPing: NoOpPing

  • ServerList<Server> ribbonServerList: ConfigurationBasedServerList

  • ServerListFilter<Server> ribbonServerListFilter: ZonePreferenceServerListFilter

  • ILoadBalancer ribbonLoadBalancer: ZoneAwareLoadBalancer

Creating a bean of one of those type and placing it in a @RibbonClient configuration (such as FooConfiguration above) allows you to override each one of the beans described. Example:

@Configuration
public class FooConfiguration {
    @Bean
    public IPing ribbonPing(IClientConfig config) {
        return new PingUrl();
    }
}

This replaces the NoOpPing with PingUrl.

Using Ribbon with Eureka

When Eureka is used in conjunction with Ribbon the ribbonServerList is overridden with an extension of DiscoveryEnabledNIWSServerList which populates the list of servers from Eureka. It also replaces the IPing interface with NIWSDiscoveryPing which delegates to Eureka to determine if a server is up. The ServerList that is installed by default is a DomainExtractingServerList and the purpose of this is to make physical metadata available to the load balancer without using AWS AMI metadata (which is what Netflix relies on). By default the server list will be constructed with "zone" information as provided in the instance metadata (so on the client set eureka.instance.metadataMap.zone), and if that is missing it can use the domain name from the server hostname as a proxy for zone (if the flag approximateZoneFromHostname is set). Once the zone information is available it can be used in a ServerListFilter (by default it will be used to locate a server in the same zone as the client because the default is a ZonePreferenceServerListFilter).

Example: How to Use Ribbon Without Eureka

Eureka is a convenient way to abstract the discovery of remote servers so you don’t have to hard code their URLs in clients, but if you prefer not to use it, Ribbon and Feign are still quite amenable. Suppose you have declared a @RibbonClient for "stores", and Eureka is not in use (and not even on the classpath). The Ribbon client defaults to a configured server list, and you can supply the configuration like this

application.yml
stores:
  ribbon:
    listOfServers: example.com,google.com

Example: Disable Eureka use in Ribbon

Setting the property ribbon.eureka.enabled = false will explicitly disable the use of Eureka in Ribbon.

application.yml
ribbon:
  eureka:
   enabled: false

Using the Ribbon API Directly

You can also use the LoadBalancerClient directly. Example:

public class MyClass {
    @Autowired
    private LoadBalancerClient loadBalancer;

    public void doStuff() {
        ServiceInstance instance = loadBalancer.choose("stores");
        URI storesUri = URI.create(String.format("http://%s:%s", instance.getHost(), instance.getPort()));
        // ... do something with the URI
    }
}

Declarative REST Client: Feign

Feign is a declarative web service client. It makes writing web service clients easier. To use Feign create an interface and annotate it. It has pluggable annotation support including Feign annotations and JAX-RS annotations. Feign also supports pluggable encoders and decoders. Spring Cloud adds support for Spring MVC annotations and for using the same HttpMessageConverters used by default in Spring Web. Spring Cloud integrates Ribbon and Eureka to provide a load balanced http client when using Feign.

Example spring boot app

@Configuration
@ComponentScan
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@EnableEurekaClient
@EnableFeignClients
public class Application {

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

}
StoreClient.java
@FeignClient("stores")
public interface StoreClient {
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/stores")
    List<Store> getStores();

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST, value = "/stores/{storeId}", consumes = "application/json")
    Store update(@PathVariable("storeId") Long storeId, Store store);
}

In the @FeignClient annotation the String value ("stores" above) is an arbitrary client name, which is used to create a Ribbon load balancer (see below for details of Ribbon support). You can also specify a URL using the url attribute (absolute value or just a hostname).

The Ribbon client above will want to discover the physical addresses for the "stores" service. If your application is a Eureka client then it will resolve the service in the Eureka service registry. If you don’t want to use Eureka, you can simply configure a list of servers in your external configuration (see above for example).

Overriding Feign Defaults

A central concept in Spring Cloud’s Feign support is that of the named client. Each feign client is part of an ensemble of components that work together to contact a remote server on demand, and the ensemble has a name that you give it as an application developer using the @FeignClient annotation. Spring Cloud creates a new ensemble as an ApplicationContext on demand for each named client using FeignClientsConfiguration. This contains (amongst other things) an feign.Decoder, a feign.Encoder, and a feign.Contract.

Spring Cloud lets you take full control of the feign client by declaring additional configuration (on top of the FeignClientsConfiguration) using @FeignClient. Example:

@FeignClient(name = "stores", configuration = FooConfiguration.class)
public interface StoreClient {
    //..
}

In this case the client is composed from the components already in FeignClientsConfiguration together with any in FooConfiguration (where the latter will override the former).

Warning
The FooConfiguration has to be @Configuration but take care that it is not in a @ComponentScan for the main application context, otherwise it will be used for every @FeignClient. If you use @ComponentScan (or @SpringBootApplication) you need to take steps to avoid it being included (for instance put it in a separate, non-overlapping package, or specify the packages to scan explicitly in the @ComponentScan).
Note
The serviceId attribute is now deprecated in favor of the name attribute.
Warning
Previously, using the url attribute, did not require the name attribute. Using name is now required.

Placeholders are supported in the name and url attributes.

@FeignClient(name = "${feign.name}", url = "${feign.url}")
public interface StoreClient {
    //..
}

Spring Cloud Netflix provides the following beans by default for feign (BeanType beanName: ClassName):

  • Decoder feignDecoder: ResponseEntityDecoder (which wraps a SpringDecoder)

  • Encoder feignEncoder: SpringEncoder

  • Logger feignLogger: Slf4jLogger

  • Contract feignContract: SpringMvcContract

  • Feign.Builder feignBuilder: HystrixFeign.Builder

Spring Cloud Netflix does not provide the following beans by default for feign, but still looks up beans of these types from the application context to create the feign client:

  • Logger.Level

  • Retryer

  • ErrorDecoder

  • Request.Options

  • Collection<RequestInterceptor>

Creating a bean of one of those type and placing it in a @FeignClient configuration (such as FooConfiguration above) allows you to override each one of the beans described. Example:

@Configuration
public class FooConfiguration {
    @Bean
    public Contract feignContractg() {
        return new feign.Contract.Default();
    }

    @Bean
    public BasicAuthRequestInterceptor basicAuthRequestInterceptor() {
        return new BasicAuthRequestInterceptor("user", "password");
    }
}

This replaces the SpringMvcContract with feign.Contract.Default and adds a RequestInterceptor to the collection of RequestInterceptor.

Default configurations can be specified in the @EnableFeignClients attribute defaultConfiguration in a similar manner as described above. The difference is that this configuration will apply to all feign clients.

Feign Hystrix Support

If Hystrix is on the classpath, by default Feign will wrap all methods with a circuit breaker. Returning a com.netflix.hystrix.HystrixCommand is also available. This lets you use reactive patterns (with a call to .toObservable() or .observe() or asynchronous use (with a call to .queue()).

To disable Hystrix support for Feign, set feign.hystrix.enabled=false.

To disable Hystrix support on a per-client basis create a vanilla Feign.Builder with the "prototype" scope, e.g.:

@Configuration
public class FooConfiguration {
    @Bean
	@Scope("prototype")
	public Feign.Builder feignBuilder() {
		return Feign.builder();
	}
}

Feign Hystrix Fallbacks

Hystrix supports the notion of a fallback: a default code path that is executed when they circuit is open or there is an error. To enable fallbacks for a given @FeignClient set the fallback attribute to the class name that implements the fallback.

@FeignClient(name = "hello", fallback = HystrixClientFallback.class)
protected interface HystrixClient {
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/hello")
    Hello iFailSometimes();
}

static class HystrixClientFallback implements HystrixClient {
    @Override
    public Hello iFailSometimes() {
        return new Hello("fallback");
    }
}
Warning
There is a limitation with the implementation of fallbacks in Feign and how Hystrix fallbacks work. Fallbacks are currently not supported for methods that return com.netflix.hystrix.HystrixCommand and rx.Observable.

Feign Inheritance Support

Feign supports boilerplate apis via single-inheritance interfaces. This allows grouping common operations into convenient base interfaces.

UserService.java
public interface UserService {

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value ="/users/{id}")
    User getUser(@PathVariable("id") long id);
}
UserResource.java
@RestController
public class UserResource implements UserService {

}
UserClient.java
package project.user;

@FeignClient("users")
public interface UserClient extends UserService {

}
Note
It is generally not advisable to share an interface between a server and a client. It introduces tight coupling, and also actually doesn’t work with Spring MVC in its current form (method parameter mapping is not inherited).

Feign request/response compression

You may consider enabling the request or response GZIP compression for your Feign requests. You can do this by enabling one of the properties:

feign.compression.request.enabled=true
feign.compression.response.enabled=true

Feign request compression gives you settings similar to what you may set for your web server:

feign.compression.request.enabled=true
feign.compression.request.mime-types=text/xml,application/xml,application/json
feign.compression.request.min-request-size=2048

These properties allow you to be selective about the compressed media types and minimum request threshold length.

Feign logging

A logger is created for each Feign client created. By default the name of the logger is the full class name of the interface used to create the Feign client. Feign logging only responds to the DEBUG level.

application.yml
logging.level.project.user.UserClient: DEBUG

The Logger.Level object that you may configure per client, tells Feign how much to log. Choices are:

  • NONE, No logging (DEFAULT).

  • BASIC, Log only the request method and URL and the response status code and execution time.

  • HEADERS, Log the basic information along with request and response headers.

  • FULL, Log the headers, body, and metadata for both requests and responses.

For example, the following would set the Logger.Level to FULL:

@Configuration
public class FooConfiguration {
    @Bean
    Logger.Level feignLoggerLevel() {
        return Logger.Level.FULL;
    }
}

External Configuration: Archaius

Archaius is the Netflix client side configuration library. It is the library used by all of the Netflix OSS components for configuration. Archaius is an extension of the Apache Commons Configuration project. It allows updates to configuration by either polling a source for changes or for a source to push changes to the client. Archaius uses Dynamic<Type>Property classes as handles to properties.

Archaius Example
class ArchaiusTest {
    DynamicStringProperty myprop = DynamicPropertyFactory
            .getInstance()
            .getStringProperty("my.prop");

    void doSomething() {
        OtherClass.someMethod(myprop.get());
    }
}

Archaius has its own set of configuration files and loading priorities. Spring applications should generally not use Archaius directly, but the need to configure the Netflix tools natively remains. Spring Cloud has a Spring Environment Bridge so Archaius can read properties from the Spring Environment. This allows Spring Boot projects to use the normal configuration toolchain, while allowing them to configure the Netflix tools, for the most part, as documented.

Router and Filter: Zuul

Routing in an integral part of a microservice architecture. For example, / may be mapped to your web application, /api/users is mapped to the user service and /api/shop is mapped to the shop service. Zuul is a JVM based router and server side load balancer by Netflix.

Netflix uses Zuul for the following:

  • Authentication

  • Insights

  • Stress Testing

  • Canary Testing

  • Dynamic Routing

  • Service Migration

  • Load Shedding

  • Security

  • Static Response handling

  • Active/Active traffic management

Zuul’s rule engine allows rules and filters to be written in essentially any JVM language, with built in support for Java and Groovy.

Embedded Zuul Reverse Proxy

Spring Cloud has created an embedded Zuul proxy to ease the development of a very common use case where a UI application wants to proxy calls to one or more back end services. This feature is useful for a user interface to proxy to the backend services it requires, avoiding the need to manage CORS and authentication concerns independently for all the backends.

To enable it, annotate a Spring Boot main class with @EnableZuulProxy, and this forwards local calls to the appropriate service. By convention, a service with the Eureka ID "users", will receive requests from the proxy located at /users (with the prefix stripped). The proxy uses Ribbon to locate an instance to forward to via Eureka, and all requests are executed in a hystrix command, so failures will show up in Hystrix metrics, and once the circuit is open the proxy will not try to contact the service.

To skip having a service automatically added, set zuul.ignored-services to a list of service id patterns. If a service matches a pattern that is ignored, but also included in the explicitly configured routes map, then it will be unignored. Example:

application.yml
 zuul:
  ignoredServices: '*'
  routes:
    users: /myusers/**

In this example, all services are ignored except "users".

To augment or change the proxy routes, you can add external configuration like the following:

application.yml
 zuul:
  routes:
    users: /myusers/**

This means that http calls to "/myusers" get forwarded to the "users" service (for example "/myusers/101" is forwarded to "/101").

To get more fine-grained control over a route you can specify the path and the serviceId independently:

application.yml
 zuul:
  routes:
    users:
      path: /myusers/**
      serviceId: users_service

This means that http calls to "/myusers" get forwarded to the "users_service" service. The route has to have a "path" which can be specified as an ant-style pattern, so "/myusers/*" only matches one level, but "/myusers/{asterisk}{asterisk}" matches hierarchically.

The location of the backend can be specified as either a "serviceId" (for a Eureka service) or a "url" (for a physical location), e.g.

application.yml
 zuul:
  routes:
    users:
      path: /myusers/**
      url: http://example.com/users_service

These simple url-routes doesn’t get executed as HystrixCommand nor can you loadbalance multiple url with Ribbon. To achieve this specify a service-route and configure a Ribbon client for the serviceId (this currently requires disabling Eureka support in Ribbon: see above for more information), e.g.

application.yml
zuul:
  routes:
    users:
      path: /myusers/**
      serviceId: users

ribbon:
  eureka:
    enabled: false

users:
  ribbon:
    listOfServers: example.com,google.com

You can provide convention between serviceId and routes using regexmapper. It uses regular expression named group to extract variables from serviceId and inject them into a route pattern.

ApplicationConfiguration.java
@Bean
public PatternServiceRouteMapper serviceRouteMapper() {
    return new PatternServiceRouteMapper(
        "(?<name>^.+)-(?<version>v.+$)",
        "${version}/${name}");
}

This means that a serviceId "myusers-v1" will be mapped to route "/v1/myusers/{asterisk}{asterisk}". Any regular expression is accepted but all named group must be present in both servicePattern and routePattern. If servicePattern do not match a serviceId, the default behavior is used. In exemple above, a serviceId "myusers" will be mapped to route "/myusers/{asterisk}{asterisk}" (no version detected) These feature is disable by default and is only applied to discovered services.

To add a prefix to all mappings, set zuul.prefix to a value, such as /api. The proxy prefix is stripped from the request before the request is forwarded by default (switch this behaviour off with zuul.stripPrefix=false). You can also switch off the stripping of the service-specific prefix from individual routes, e.g.

application.yml
 zuul:
  routes:
    users:
      path: /myusers/**
      stripPrefix: false

In this example requests to "/myusers/101" will be forwarded to "/myusers/101" on the "users" service.

The zuul.routes entries actually bind to an object of type ProxyRouteLocator. If you look at the properties of that object you will see that it also has a "retryable" flag. Set that flag to "true" to have the Ribbon client automatically retry failed requests (and if you need to you can modify the parameters of the retry operations using the Ribbon client configuration).

The X-Forwarded-Host header is added to the forwarded requests by default. To turn it off set zuul.addProxyHeaders = false. The prefix path is stripped by default, and the request to the backend picks up a header "X-Forwarded-Prefix" ("/myusers" in the examples above).

An application with the @EnableZuulProxy could act as a standalone server if you set a default route ("/"), for example zuul.route.home: / would route all traffic (i.e. "/{asterisk}{asterisk}") to the "home" service.

If more fine-grained ignoring is needed, you can specify specific patterns to ignore. These patterns are being evaluated at the start of the route location process, which means prefixes should be included in the pattern to warrant a match. Ignored patterns span all services and supersede any other route specification.

application.yml
 zuul:
  ignoredPatterns: /**/admin/**
  routes:
    users: /myusers/**

This means that all calls such as "/myusers/101" will be forwarded to "/101" on the "users" service. But calls including "/admin/" will not resolve.

Strangulation Patterns and Local Forwards

A common pattern when migrating an existing application or API is to "strangle" old endpoints, slowly replacing them with different implementations. The Zuul proxy is a useful tool for this because you can use it to handle all traffic from clients of the old endpoints, but redirect some of the requests to new ones.

Example configuration:

application.yml
 zuul:
  routes:
    first:
      path: /first/**
      url: http://first.example.com
    second:
      path: /second/**
      url: forward:/second
    third:
      path: /third/**
      url: forward:/3rd
    legacy:
      path: /**
      url: http://legacy.example.com

In this example we are strangling the "legacy" app which is mapped to all requests that do not match one of the other patterns. Paths in /first/{asterisk}{asterisk} have been extracted into a new service with an external URL. And paths in /second/{asterisk}{asterisk} are forwared so they can be handled locally, e.g. with a normal Spring @RequestMapping. Paths in /third/{asterisk}{asterisk} are also forwarded, but with a different prefix (i.e. /third/foo is forwarded to /3rd/foo).

Note
The ignored pattterns aren’t completely ignored, they just aren’t handled by the proxy (so they are also effectively forwarded locally).

Uploading Files through Zuul

If you @EnableZuulProxy you can use the proxy paths to upload files and it should just work as long as the files are small. For large files there is an alternative path which bypasses the Spring DispatcherServlet (to avoid multipart processing) in "/zuul/*". I.e. if zuul.routes.customers=/customers/{asterisk}{asterisk} then you can POST large files to "/zuul/customers/*". The servlet path is externalized via zuul.servletPath. Extremely large files will also require elevated timeout settings if the proxy route takes you through a Ribbon load balancer, e.g.

application.yml
hystrix.command.default.execution.isolation.thread.timeoutInMilliseconds: 60000
ribbon:
  ConnectTimeout: 3000
  ReadTimeout: 60000

Note that for streaming to work with large files, you need to use chunked encoding in the request (which some browsers do not do by default). E.g. on the command line:

$ curl -v -H "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" \
    -F "file=@mylarge.iso" localhost:9999/zuul/simple/file

Plain Embedded Zuul

You can also run a Zuul server without the proxying, or switch on parts of the proxying platform selectively, if you use @EnableZuulServer (instead of @EnableZuulProxy). Any beans that you add to the application of type ZuulFilter will be installed automatically, as they are with @EnableZuulProxy, but without any of the proxy filters being added automatically.

In this case the routes into the Zuul server are still specified by configuring "zuul.routes.*", but there is no service discovery and no proxying, so the "serviceId" and "url" settings are ignored. For example:

application.yml
 zuul:
  routes:
    api: /api/**

maps all paths in "/api/{asterisk}{asterisk}" to the Zuul filter chain.

Disable Zuul Filters

Zuul for Spring Cloud comes with a number of ZuulFilter beans enabled by default in both proxy and server mode. See the zuul filters package for the possible filters that are enabled. If you want to disable one, simply set zuul.<SimpleClassName>.<filterType>.disable=true. By convention, the package after filters is the Zuul filter type. For example to disable org.springframework.cloud.netflix.zuul.filters.post.SendResponseFilter set zuul.SendResponseFilter.post.disable=true.

Polyglot support with Sidecar

Do you have non-jvm languages you want to take advantage of Eureka, Ribbon and Config Server? The Spring Cloud Netflix Sidecar was inspired by Netflix Prana. It includes a simple http api to get all of the instances (ie host and port) for a given service. You can also proxy service calls through an embedded Zuul proxy which gets its route entries from Eureka. The Spring Cloud Config Server can be accessed directly via host lookup or through the Zuul Proxy. The non-jvm app should implement a health check so the Sidecar can report to eureka if the app is up or down.

To enable the Sidecar, create a Spring Boot application with @EnableSidecar. This annotation includes @EnableCircuitBreaker, @EnableDiscoveryClient, and @EnableZuulProxy. Run the resulting application on the same host as the non-jvm application.

To configure the side car add sidecar.port and sidecar.health-uri to application.yml. The sidecar.port property is the port the non-jvm app is listening on. This is so the Sidecar can properly register the app with Eureka. The sidecar.health-uri is a uri accessible on the non-jvm app that mimicks a Spring Boot health indicator. It should return a json document like the following:

health-uri-document
{
  "status":"UP"
}

Here is an example application.yml for a Sidecar application:

application.yml
server:
  port: 5678
spring:
  application:
    name: sidecar

sidecar:
  port: 8000
  health-uri: http://localhost:8000/health.json

The api for the DiscoveryClient.getInstances() method is /hosts/{serviceId}. Here is an example response for /hosts/customers that returns two instances on different hosts. This api is accessible to the non-jvm app (if the sidecar is on port 5678) at http://localhost:5678/hosts/{serviceId}.

/hosts/customers
[
    {
        "host": "myhost",
        "port": 9000,
        "uri": "http://myhost:9000",
        "serviceId": "CUSTOMERS",
        "secure": false
    },
    {
        "host": "myhost2",
        "port": 9000,
        "uri": "http://myhost2:9000",
        "serviceId": "CUSTOMERS",
        "secure": false
    }
]

The Zuul proxy automatically adds routes for each service known in eureka to /<serviceId>, so the customers service is available at /customers. The Non-jvm app can access the customer service via http://localhost:5678/customers (assuming the sidecar is listening on port 5678).

If the Config Server is registered with Eureka, non-jvm application can access it via the Zuul proxy. If the serviceId of the ConfigServer is configserver and the Sidecar is on port 5678, then it can be accessed at http://localhost:5678/configserver

Non-jvm app can take advantage of the Config Server’s ability to return YAML documents. For example, a call to http://sidecar.local.spring.io:5678/configserver/default-master.yml might result in a YAML document like the following

eureka:
  client:
    serviceUrl:
      defaultZone: http://localhost:8761/eureka/
  password: password
info:
  description: Spring Cloud Samples
  url: https://github.com/spring-cloud-samples

Metrics: Spectator, Servo, and Atlas

When used together, Spectator/Servo and Atlas provide a near real-time operational insight platform.

Spectator and Servo are Netflix’s metrics collection libraries. Atlas is a Netflix metrics backend to manage dimensional time series data.

Servo served Netflix for several years and is still usable, but is gradually being phased out in favor of Spectator, which is only designed to work with Java 8. Spring Cloud Netflix provides support for both, but Java 8 based applications are encouraged to use Spectator.

Dimensional vs. Hierarchical Metrics

Spring Boot Actuator metrics are hierarchical and metrics are separated only by name. These names often follow a naming convention that embeds key/value attribute pairs (dimensions) into the name separated by periods. Consider the following metrics for two endpoints, root and star-star:

{
    "counter.status.200.root": 20,
    "counter.status.400.root": 3,
    "counter.status.200.star-star": 5,
}

The first metric gives us a normalized count of successful requests against the root endpoint per unit of time. But what if the system had 20 endpoints and you want to get a count of successful requests against all the endpoints? Some hierarchical metrics backends would allow you to specify a wild card such as counter.status.200. that would read all 20 metrics and aggregate the results. Alternatively, you could provide a HandlerInterceptorAdapter that intercepts and records a metric like counter.status.200.all for all successful requests irrespective of the endpoint, but now you must write 20+1 different metrics. Similarly if you want to know the total number of successful requests for all endpoints in the service, you could specify a wild card such as counter.status.2.*.

Even in the presence of wildcarding support on a hierarchical metrics backend, naming consistency can be difficult. Specifically the position of these tags in the name string can slip with time, breaking queries. For example, suppose we add an additional dimension to the hierarchical metrics above for HTTP method. Then counter.status.200.root becomes counter.status.200.method.get.root, etc. Our counter.status.200.* suddenly no longer has the same semantic meaning. Furthermore, if the new dimension is not applied uniformly across the codebase, certain queries may become impossible. This can quickly get out of hand.

Netflix metrics are tagged (a.k.a. dimensional). Each metric has a name, but this single named metric can contain multiple statistics and 'tag' key/value pairs that allows more querying flexibility. In fact, the statistics themselves are recorded in a special tag.

Recorded with Netflix Servo or Spectator, a timer for the root endpoint described above contains 4 statistics per status code, where the count statistic is identical to Spring Boot Actuator’s counter. In the event that we have encountered an HTTP 200 and 400 thus far, there will be 8 available data points:

{
    "root(status=200,stastic=count)": 20,
    "root(status=200,stastic=max)": 0.7265630630000001,
    "root(status=200,stastic=totalOfSquares)": 0.04759702862580789,
    "root(status=200,stastic=totalTime)": 0.2093076914666667,
    "root(status=400,stastic=count)": 1,
    "root(status=400,stastic=max)": 0,
    "root(status=400,stastic=totalOfSquares)": 0,
    "root(status=400,stastic=totalTime)": 0,
}

Default Metrics Collection

Without any additional dependencies or configuration, a Spring Cloud based service will autoconfigure a Servo MonitorRegistry and begin collecting metrics on every Spring MVC request. By default, a Servo timer with the name rest will be recorded for each MVC request which is tagged with:

  1. HTTP method

  2. HTTP status (e.g. 200, 400, 500)

  3. URI (or "root" if the URI is empty), sanitized for Atlas

  4. The exception class name, if the request handler threw an exception

  5. The caller, if a request header with a key matching netflix.metrics.rest.callerHeader is set on the request. There is no default key for netflix.metrics.rest.callerHeader. You must add it to your application properties if you wish to collect caller information.

Set the netflix.metrics.rest.metricName property to change the name of the metric from rest to a name you provide.

If Spring AOP is enabled and org.aspectj:aspectjweaver is present on your runtime classpath, Spring Cloud will also collect metrics on every client call made with RestTemplate. A Servo timer with the name of restclient will be recorded for each MVC request which is tagged with:

  1. HTTP method

  2. HTTP status (e.g. 200, 400, 500), "CLIENT_ERROR" if the response returned null, or "IO_ERROR" if an IOException occurred during the execution of the RestTemplate method

  3. URI, sanitized for Atlas

  4. Client name

Metrics Collection: Spectator

To enable Spectator metrics, include a dependency on spring-boot-starter-spectator:

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

In Spectator parlance, a meter is a named, typed, and tagged configuration and a metric represents the value of a given meter at a point in time. Spectator meters are created and controlled by a registry, which currently has several different implementations. Spectator provides 4 meter types: counter, timer, gauge, and distribution summary.

Spring Cloud Spectator integration configures an injectable com.netflix.spectator.api.Registry instance for you. Specifically, it configures a ServoRegistry instance in order to unify the collection of REST metrics and the exporting of metrics to the Atlas backend under a single Servo API. Practically, this means that your code may use a mixture of Servo monitors and Spectator meters and both will be scooped up by Spring Boot Actuator MetricReader instances and both will be shipped to the Atlas backend.

Spectator Counter

A counter is used to measure the rate at which some event is occurring.

// create a counter with a name and a set of tags
Counter counter = registry.counter("counterName", "tagKey1", "tagValue1", ...);
counter.increment(); // increment when an event occurs
counter.increment(10); // increment by a discrete amount

The counter records a single time-normalized statistic.

Spectator Timer

A timer is used to measure how long some event is taking. Spring Cloud automatically records timers for Spring MVC requests and conditionally RestTemplate requests, which can later be used to create dashboards for request related metrics like latency:

Request Latency

image::RequestLatency.png []

// create a timer with a name and a set of tags
Timer timer = registry.timer("timerName", "tagKey1", "tagValue1", ...);

// execute an operation and time it at the same time
T result = timer.record(() -> fooReturnsT());

// alternatively, if you must manually record the time
Long start = System.nanoTime();
T result = fooReturnsT();
timer.record(System.nanoTime() - start, TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS);

The timer simultaneously records 4 statistics: count, max, totalOfSquares, and totalTime. The count statistic will always match the single normalized value provided by a counter if you had called increment() once on the counter for each time you recorded a timing, so it is rarely necessary to count and time separately for a single operation.

For long running operations, Spectator provides a special LongTaskTimer.

Spectator Gauge

Gauges are used to determine some current value like the size of a queue or number of threads in a running state. Since gauges are sampled, they provide no information about how these values fluctuate between samples.

The normal use of a gauge involves registering the gauge once in initialization with an id, a reference to the object to be sampled, and a function to get or compute a numeric value based on the object. The reference to the object is passed in separately and the Spectator registry will keep a weak reference to the object. If the object is garbage collected, then Spectator will automatically drop the registration. See the note in Spectator’s documentation about potential memory leaks if this API is misused.

// the registry will automatically sample this gauge periodically
registry.gauge("gaugeName", pool, Pool::numberOfRunningThreads);

// manually sample a value in code at periodic intervals -- last resort!
registry.gauge("gaugeName", Arrays.asList("tagKey1", "tagValue1", ...), 1000);

Spectator Distribution Summaries

A distribution summary is used to track the distribution of events. It is similar to a timer, but more general in that the size does not have to be a period of time. For example, a distribution summary could be used to measure the payload sizes of requests hitting a server.

// the registry will automatically sample this gauge periodically
DistributionSummary ds = registry.distributionSummary("dsName", "tagKey1", "tagValue1", ...);
ds.record(request.sizeInBytes());

Metrics Collection: Servo

Warning
If your code is compiled on Java 8, please use Spectator instead of Servo as Spectator is destined to replace Servo entirely in the long term.

In Servo parlance, a monitor is a named, typed, and tagged configuration and a metric represents the value of a given monitor at a point in time. Servo monitors are logically equivalent to Spectator meters. Servo monitors are created and controlled by a MonitorRegistry. In spite of the above warning, Servo does have a wider array of monitor options than Spectator has meters.

Spring Cloud integration configures an injectable com.netflix.servo.MonitorRegistry instance for you. Once you have created the appropriate Monitor type in Servo, the process of recording data is wholly similar to Spectator.

Creating Servo Monitors

If you are using the Servo MonitorRegistry instance provided by Spring Cloud (specifically, an instance of DefaultMonitorRegistry), Servo provides convenience classes for retrieving counters and timers. These convenience classes ensure that only one Monitor is registered for each unique combination of name and tags.

To manually create a Monitor type in Servo, especially for the more exotic monitor types for which convenience methods are not provided, instantiate the appropriate type by providing a MonitorConfig instance:

MonitorConfig config = MonitorConfig.builder("timerName").withTag("tagKey1", "tagValue1").build();

// somewhere we should cache this Monitor by MonitorConfig
Timer timer = new BasicTimer(config);
monitorRegistry.register(timer);

Metrics Backend: Atlas

Atlas was developed by Netflix to manage dimensional time series data for near real-time operational insight. Atlas features in-memory data storage, allowing it to gather and report very large numbers of metrics, very quickly.

Atlas captures operational intelligence. Whereas business intelligence is data gathered for analyzing trends over time, operational intelligence provides a picture of what is currently happening within a system.

Spring Cloud provides a spring-cloud-starter-atlas that has all the dependencies you need. Then just annotate your Spring Boot application with @EnableAtlas and provide a location for your running Atlas server with the netflix.atlas.uri property.

Global tags

Spring Cloud enables you to add tags to every metric sent to the Atlas backend. Global tags can be used to separate metrics by application name, environment, region, etc.

Each bean implementing AtlasTagProvider will contribute to the global tag list:

@Bean
AtlasTagProvider atlasCommonTags(
    @Value("${spring.application.name}") String appName) {
  return () -> Collections.singletonMap("app", appName);
}

Using Atlas

To bootstrap a in-memory standalone Atlas instance:

$ curl -LO https://github.com/Netflix/atlas/releases/download/v1.4.2/atlas-1.4.2-standalone.jar
$ java -jar atlas-1.4.2-standalone.jar
Tip
An Atlas standalone node running on an r3.2xlarge (61GB RAM) can handle roughly 2 million metrics per minute for a given 6 hour window.

Once running and you have collected a handful of metrics, verify that your setup is correct by listing tags on the Atlas server:

$ curl http://ATLAS/api/v1/tags
Tip
After executing several requests against your service, you can gather some very basic information on the request latency of every request by pasting the following url in your browser: http://ATLAS/api/v1/graph?q=name,rest,:eq,:avg

The Atlas wiki contains a compilation of sample queries for various scenarios.

Make sure to check out the alerting philosophy and docs on using double exponential smoothing to generate dynamic alert thresholds.

Spring Cloud Stream

Spring Cloud Stream Overview

Introducing Spring Cloud Stream

The Spring Cloud Stream project allows a user to develop and run messaging microservices using Spring Integration. Just add @EnableBinding and run your app as a Spring Boot app (single application context). Spring Cloud Stream applications connect to the physical broker through bindings, which link Spring Integration channels to physical broker destinations, for either input (consumer bindings) or output (producer bindings). The creation of the bindings, and therefore their broker-specific implementation is handled by a binder, which is another important abstraction of Spring Cloud Stream. Binders abstract out the broker-specific implementation details. In order to connect to a specific type of broker (e.g. Rabbit or Kafka) you just need to have the relevant binder implementation on the classpath.

Here’s a sample source app (output channel only):

@SpringBootApplication
public class StreamApplication {

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

@EnableBinding(Source.class)
public class TimerSource {

  @Value("${format}")
  private String format;

  @Bean
  @InboundChannelAdapter(value = Source.OUTPUT, poller = @Poller(fixedDelay = "${fixedDelay}", maxMessagesPerPoll = "1"))
  public MessageSource<String> timerMessageSource() {
    return () -> new GenericMessage<>(new SimpleDateFormat(format).format(new Date()));
  }
}

@EnableBinding is parameterized by one or more interfaces (in this case a single Source interface), which declares input and/or output channels. The interfaces Source, Sink and Processor are provided off the shelf, but you can define others. Here’s the definition of Source:

public interface Source {
  String OUTPUT = "output";

  @Output(Source.OUTPUT)
  MessageChannel output();
}

The @Output annotation is used to identify output channels (messages leaving the app), and @Input is used to identify input channels (messages entering the app). It is optionally parameterized by a channel name - if the name is not provided the method name is used instead. An implementation of the interface is created for you and can be used in the application context by autowiring it, e.g. into a test case:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@SpringApplicationConfiguration(classes = StreamApplication.class)
@WebAppConfiguration
@DirtiesContext
public class StreamApplicationTests {

  @Autowired
  private Source source

  @Test
  public void contextLoads() {
    assertNotNull(this.source.output());
  }
}
Note
In this case there is only one Source in the application context so there is no need to qualify it when it is autowired. If there is ambiguity, e.g. if you are composing one application from some others, you can use the @Bindings qualifier to inject a specific channel set. The @Bindings qualifier takes a parameter which is the class that carries the @EnableBinding annotation (in this case the TimerSource).

Multiple Input or Output Channels

A stream app can have multiple input or output channels defined as @Input and @Output methods in an interface. Instead of just one channel named "input" or "output", you can add multiple MessageChannel methods annotated with @Input or @Output, and their names will be converted to external destination names on the broker. It is common to specify the channel names at runtime in order to have multiple applications communicate over well known destination names. Channel names can be specified as properties that consist of the channel names prefixed with spring.cloud.stream.bindings (e.g. spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input or spring.cloud.stream.bindings.output). These properties can be specified though environment variables, the application YAML file, or any of the other mechanisms supported by Spring Boot.

For example, you can have two MessageChannels called "default" and "tap" in an application with spring.cloud.stream.bindings.default.destination=foo and spring.cloud.stream.bindings.tap.destination=bar, and the result is 2 bindings to an external broker with destinations called "foo" and "bar".

Inter-app Communication

While Spring Cloud Stream makes it easy for individual boot apps to connect to messaging systems, the typical scenario for Spring Cloud Stream is the creation of multi-app pipelines, where microservice apps are sending data to each other. This can be achieved by correlating the input and output destinations of adjacent apps, as in the following example.

Supposing that the design calls for the time-source app to send data to the log-sink app, we will use a common destination named ticktock for bindings within both apps. time-source will set spring.cloud.stream.bindings.output.destination=ticktock, and log-sink will set spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input.destination=ticktock.

Consumer Group Support

Spring Cloud Stream is a library focusing on building message-driven microservices, and more specifically stream processing applications. In such scenarios, communication between different logical applications follows a publish-subscribe pattern, with data being broadcast through a shared topic, but at the same time, it is important to be able to scale up by creating multiple instances of a given application, which are in a competing consumer relationship with each other.

Spring Cloud Stream models this behavior through the concept of a consumer group, which is similar to the notion of consumer groups in Kafka. Each consumer binding can specify a group name such as spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input.group=foo (the actual name of the binding may vary). Each consumer group bound to a given destination will receive a copy of the published data, but within the group, only one application will receive each specific message.

If no consumer group is specified for a given binding, then the binding is treated as if belonging to an anonymous, independent, single-member consumer group. Otherwise said, if no consumer group is specified for a binding, it will be in a publish-subscribe relationship with any other consumer groups.

In general, it is preferable to always specify a consumer group when binding an application to a given destination. When scaling up a Spring Cloud Stream application, a consumer group must be specified for each of its input bindings, in order to prevent its instances from receiving duplicate messages (unless that behavior is desired, which is a less common use case).

Note
This feature has been introduced since version 1.0.0.M4.

Instance Index and Instance Count

When scaling up Spring Cloud Stream applications, each instance can receive information about how many other instances of the same application exist and what its own instance index is. This is done through the spring.cloud.stream.instanceCount and spring.cloud.stream.instanceIndex properties. For example, if there are 3 instances of the HDFS sink application, all three will have spring.cloud.stream.instanceCount set to 3, and the applications will have spring.cloud.stream.instanceIndex set to 0, 1 and 2, respectively. When Spring Cloud Stream applications are deployed via Spring Cloud Data Flow, these properties are configured automatically, but when Spring Cloud Stream applications are launched independently, these properties must be set correctly. By default spring.cloud.stream.instanceCount is 1, and spring.cloud.stream.instanceIndex is 0.

Setting up the two properties correctly on scale up scenarios is important for addressing partitioning behavior in general (see below), and they are always required by certain types of binders (e.g. the Kafka binder) in order to ensure that data is split correctly across multiple consumer instances.

Advanced Binding Properties

The input and output destination names are the primary properties to set in order to have Spring Cloud Stream applications communicate with each other as their channels are bound to an external message broker automatically. However, there are a number of scenarios where it is required to configure other attributes besides the destination name. This is done using the following naming scheme: spring.cloud.stream.bindings.<channelName>.<attributeName>=<attributeValue>. The destination attribute is one such example: spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input.destination=foo. A shorthand equivalent can be used as follows: spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input=foo, but that shorthand can only be used only when there are no other attributes to set on the binding. In other words, spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input.destination=foo,spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input.partitioned=true is a valid setup, whereas spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input=foo,spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input.partitioned=true is not.

Partitioning

Spring Cloud Stream provides support for partitioning data between multiple instances of a given application. In a partitioned scenario, one or more producer apps will send data to one or more consumer apps, ensuring that data with common characteristics is processed by the same consumer instance. The physical communication medium (i.e. the broker topic or queue) is viewed as structured into multiple partitions. Regardless of whether the broker type is naturally partitioned (e.g. Kafka) or not (e.g. Rabbit), Spring Cloud Stream provides a common abstraction for implementing partitioned processing use cases in a uniform fashion.

Setting up a partitioned processing scenario requires configuring both the data producing and the data consuming end.

Configuring Output Bindings for Partitioning

An output binding is configured to send partitioned data, by setting one and only one of its partitionKeyExpression or partitionKeyExtractorClass properties, as well as its partitionCount property. For example, setting spring.cloud.stream.bindings.output.partitionKeyExpression=payload.id,spring.cloud.stream.bindings.output.partitionCount=5 is a valid and typical configuration.

Based on this configuration, the data will be sent to the target partition using the following logic. A partition key’s value is calculated for each message sent to a partitioned output channel based on the partitionKeyExpression. The partitionKeyExpression is a SpEL expression that is evaluated against the outbound message for extracting the partitioning key. If a SpEL expression is not sufficient for your needs, you can instead calculate the partition key value by setting the property partitionKeyExtractorClass. This class must implement the interface org.springframework.cloud.stream.binder.PartitionKeyExtractorStrategy. While, in general, the SpEL expression should suffice, more complex cases may use the custom implementation strategy.

Once the message key is calculated, the partition selection process will determine the target partition as a value between 0 and partitionCount - 1. The default calculation, applicable in most scenarios is based on the formula key.hashCode() % partitionCount. This can be customized on the binding, either by setting a SpEL expression to be evaluated against the key via the partitionSelectorExpression property, or by setting a org.springframework.cloud.stream.binder.PartitionSelectorStrategy implementation via the partitionSelectorClass property.

Additional properties can be configured for more advanced scenarios, as described in the following section.

Configuring Input Bindings for Partitioning

An input binding is configured to receive partitioned data by setting its partitioned property, as well as the instance index and instance count properties on the app itself, as follows: spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input.partitioned=true,spring.cloud.stream.instanceIndex=3,spring.cloud.stream.instanceCount=5. The instance count value represents the total number of app instances between which the data needs to be partitioned, whereas instance index must be a unique value across the multiple instances, between 0 and instanceCount - 1. The instance index helps each app instance to identify the unique partition (or in the case of Kafka, the partition set) from which it receives data. It is important that both values are set correctly in order to ensure that all the data is consumed, and that the app instances receive mutually exclusive datasets.

While setting up multiple instances for partitioned data processing may be complex in the standalone case, Spring Cloud Data Flow can simplify the process significantly, by populating both the input and output values correctly, as well as relying on the runtime infrastructure to provide information about the instance index and instance count.

Binder Selection

Spring Cloud Stream relies on implementations of the Binder SPI to perform the task of connecting channels to message brokers. Each Binder implementation typically connects to one type of messaging system. Spring Cloud Stream provides out of the box binders for Kafka, RabbitMQ and Redis.

Classpath Detection

By default, Spring Cloud Stream relies on Spring Boot’s auto-configuration to configure the binding process. If a single binder implementation is found on the classpath, Spring Cloud Stream will use it automatically. So, for example, a Spring Cloud Stream project that aims to bind only to RabbitMQ can simply add the following dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-cloud-stream-binder-rabbit</artifactId>
</dependency>
Multiple Binders on the Classpath

When multiple binders are present on the classpath, the application must indicate which binder is to be used for each channel binding. Each binder configuration contains a META-INF/spring.binders, which is a simple properties file:

rabbit:\
org.springframework.cloud.stream.binder.rabbit.config.RabbitServiceAutoConfiguration

Similar files exist for the other binder implementations (i.e. Kafka and Redis), and it is expected that custom binder implementations will provide them, too. The key represents an identifying name for the binder implementation, whereas the value is a comma-separated list of configuration classes that contain one and only one bean definition of the type org.springframework.cloud.stream.binder.Binder.

Selecting the binder can be done globally by either using the spring.cloud.stream.defaultBinder property, e.g. spring.cloud.stream.defaultBinder=rabbit, or by individually configuring them on each channel binding.

For instance, a processor app that reads from Kafka and writes to Rabbit can specify the following configuration: spring.cloud.stream.bindings.input.binder=kafka,spring.cloud.stream.bindings.output.binder=rabbit.

Connecting to Multiple Systems

By default, binders share the Spring Boot auto-configuration of the application and create one instance of each binder found on the classpath. In scenarios where an application should connect to more than one broker of the same type, Spring Cloud Stream allows you to specify multiple binder configurations, with different environment settings. Please note that turning on explicit binder configuration will disable the default binder configuration process altogether, so all the binders in use must be included in the configuration.

For example, this is the typical configuration for a processor that connects to two RabbitMQ broker instances:

spring:
  cloud:
    stream:
      bindings:
        input:
          destination: foo
          binder: rabbit1
        output:
          destination: bar
          binder: rabbit2
      binders:
        rabbit1:
          type: rabbit
          environment:
            spring:
              rabbitmq:
                host: <host1>
        rabbit2:
          type: rabbit
          environment:
            spring:
              rabbitmq:
                host: <host2>

Managed vs Standalone

Code using the Spring Cloud Stream library can be deployed as a standalone application or be used as a Spring Cloud Data Flow module. In standalone mode, your application will run happily as a service or in any PaaS (Cloud Foundry, Heroku, Azure, etc.). Spring Cloud Data Flow helps orchestrate the communication between instances, so the aspects of configuration that deal with application interconnection will be configured transparently.

Fat JAR

You can run in standalone mode from your IDE for testing. To run in production you can create an executable (or "fat") JAR using the standard Spring Boot tooling provided for Maven or Gradle.

Health Indicator

Spring Cloud Stream provides a health indicator for the binders, registered under the name of binders. It can be enabled or disabled using the management.health.binders.enabled property.

Binder SPI

As described above, Spring Cloud Stream provides a binder abstraction for connecting to physical destinations. This section will provide more information about the main concepts behind the Binder SPI, its main components, as well as details specific to different implementations.

Producers and Consumers

producers consumers
Figure 4. Producers and Consumers

A producer is any component that sends messages to a channel. That channel can be bound to an external message broker via a Binder implementation for that broker. When invoking the bindProducer method, the first parameter is the name of the destination within that broker. The second parameter is the local channel instance to which the producer will be sending messages, and the third parameter contains properties to be used within the adapter that is created for that channel, such as a partition key expression.

A consumer is any component that receives messages from a channel. As with the producer, the consumer’s channel can be bound to an external message broker, and the first parameter for the bindConsumer method is the destination name. However, on the consumer side, a second parameter provides the name of a logical group of consumers. Each group represented by consumer bindings for a given destination will receive a copy of each message that a producer sends to that destination (i.e. pub/sub semantics). If there are multiple consumer instances bound using the same group name, then messages will be load balanced across those consumer instances so that each message sent by a producer would only be consumed by a single consumer instance within each group (i.e. queue semantics).

Kafka Binder

kafka binder
Figure 5. Kafka Binder

The Kafka Binder implementation maps the destination to a Kafka topic, and the consumer group maps directly to the same Kafka concept. Spring Cloud Stream does not use the high level consumer, but implements a similar concept for the simple consumer.

RabbitMQ Binder

rabbit binder
Figure 6. RabbitMQ Binder

The RabbitMQ Binder implementation maps the destination to a TopicExchange, and for each consumer group, a Queue will be bound to that TopicExchange. Each consumer instance that binds will trigger creation of a corresponding RabbitMQ Consumer instance for its group’s Queue.

Redis Binder

redis binder
Figure 7. Redis Binder
Note
we recommend only using the Redis Binder for development

The Redis Binder creates a LIST (which performs the role of a queue) for each consumer group. A consumer binding will trigger BRPOP operations on its group’s LIST. A producer binding will consult a ZSET to determine what groups currently have active consumers, and then for each message being sent, an LPUSH operation will be executed on each of those group’s LISTs.

Spring Cloud Task

Getting started

If you’re just getting started with Spring Cloud Task, this is the section for you! Here we answer the basic “what?”, “how?” and “why?” questions. You’ll find a gentle introduction to Spring Cloud Task. We’ll then build our first Spring Cloud Task application, discussing some core principles as we go.

Introducing Spring Cloud Task

Spring Cloud Task makes it easy to create short lived microservices. We provide capabilities that allow short lived JVM processes to be executed on demand in a production environment.

System Requirements

You need Java installed (Java 7 or better, we recommend Java 8) and to build you need to have Maven installed as well.

Database Requirements

Spring Cloud Task uses a relational database to store the results of an executed task. While you can begin developing a task without a database (the status of the task is logged as part of the task repository’s updates), for production environments, you’ll want to utilize a supported database. Below is a list of the ones currently supported:

  • H2

  • HSQLDB

  • MySql

  • Oracle

  • Postgres

Developing your first Spring Cloud Task application

A good place to start is with a simple "Hello World!" application so we’ll create the Spring Cloud Task equivalent to highlight the features of the framework. We’ll use Apache Maven as a build tool for this project since most IDEs have good support for it.

Note
The spring.io web site contains many “Getting Started” guides that use Spring Boot. If you’re looking to solve a specific problem; check there first. You can shortcut the steps below by going to start.spring.io and creating a new project. This will automatically generate a new project structure so that you can start coding right the way. Check the documentation for more details.

Before we begin, open a terminal to check that you have valid versions of Java and Maven installed.

$ java -version
java version "1.8.0_31"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_31-b13)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.31-b07, mixed mode)
$ mvn -v
Apache Maven 3.2.3 (33f8c3e1027c3ddde99d3cdebad2656a31e8fdf4; 2014-08-11T15:58:10-05:00)
Maven home: /usr/local/Cellar/maven/3.2.3/libexec
Java version: 1.8.0_31, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Note
This sample needs to be created in its own folder. Subsequent instructions assume you have created a suitable folder and that it is your "current directory".

Creating the POM

We need to start by creating a Maven pom.xml file. The pom.xml is the recipe that will be used to build your project. Open your favorite text editor and add the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
		 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
		 xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">

	<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

	<groupId>com.example</groupId>
	<artifactId>myproject</artifactId>
	<packaging>jar</packaging>
	<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>

	<parent>
		<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
		<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
		<version>1.3.2.RELEASE</version>
	</parent>

	<properties>
		<start-class>com.example.SampleTask</start-class>
	</properties>

	<dependencies>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
		</dependency>
	</dependencies>

	<build>
		<plugins>
			<plugin>
				<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
				<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
			</plugin>
		</plugins>
	</build>
</project>

This should give you a working build. You can test it out by running mvn package (you can ignore the "jar will be empty - no content was marked for inclusion!" warning for now).

Note
At this point you could import the project into an IDE (most modern Java IDE’s include built-in support for Maven). For simplicity we will continue to use a plain text editor for this example.

Adding classpath dependencies

A Spring Cloud Task is made up of a Spring Boot application that is expected to end. In our POM above, we created the shell of a Spring Boot application from a dependency perspective by setting our parent to use the spring-boot-starter-parent.

Spring Boot provides a number of additional "Starter POMs". Some of which are appropriate for use within tasks (spring-boot-starter-batch, spring-boot-starter-jdbc, etc) and some may not be ('spring-boot-starter-web` is probably not going to be used in a task). The indicator of if a starter makes sense or not comes down to if the resulting application will end (batch based applications typically end, the spring-boot-starter-web dependency bootstraps a servlet container which probably wont').

For this example, we’ll only need to add a single additional dependency, the one for Spring Cloud Task itself:

		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-cloud-task-core</artifactId>
			<version>1.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT</version>
		</dependency>

Writing the code

To finish our application, we need to create a single Java file. Maven will compile the sources from src/main/java by default so you need to create that folder structure. Then add a file named src/main/java/com/example/SampleTask.java:

package com.example;

import org.springframework.boot.*;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.cloud.task.configuration.EnableTask;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableTask
public class SampleTask {

	@Bean
	public CommandLineRunner commandLineRunner() {
		return new HelloWorldCommandLineRunner();
	}

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

	public static class HelloWorldCommandLineRunner implements CommandLineRunner {

		@Override
		public void run(String... strings) throws Exception {
			System.out.println("Hello World!");
		}
	}
}

While it may not look like much, quite a bit is going on. To read more about the Spring Boot specifics, take a look at their reference documentation here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/

The @EnableTask annotation

The first non boot annotation in our example is the @EnableTask annotation. This class level annotation tells Spring Cloud Task to bootstrap it’s functionality. This occurs by importing an additional configuration class, SimpleTaskConfiguration by default. This additional configuration registers the TaskRepository and the infrastructure for its use.

Out of the box, the TaskRepository will use an in memory Map to record the results of a task. Obviously this isn’t a practical solution for a production environment since the Map goes away once the task ends. However, for a quick getting started experience we use this as a default as well as echoing to the logs what is being updated in that repository. Later in this documentation we’ll cover how to customize the configuration of the pieces provided by Spring Cloud Task.

When our sample application is run, Spring Boot will launch our HelloWorldCommandLineRunner outputting our "Hello World!" message to standard out. The TaskLifecyceListener will record the start of the task and the end of the task in the repository.

The main method

The main method serves as the entry point to any java application. Our main method delegates to Spring Boot’s SpringApplication class. You can read more about it in the Spring Boot documentation.

The CommandLineRunner

In Spring, there are many ways to bootstrap an application’s logic. Spring Boot provides a convenient method of doing so in an organized manor via their *Runner interfaces (CommandLineRunner or ApplicationRunner). A well behaved task will bootstrap any logic via one of these two runners.

The lifecycle of a task is considered from before the *Runner#run methods are executed to once they are all complete. Spring Boot allows an application to use multiple *Runner implementation and Spring Cloud Task doesn’t attempt to impede on this convention.

Note
Any processing bootstrapped from mechanisms other than a CommandLineRunner or ApplicationRunner (using InitializingBean#afterPropertiesSet for example) will not be recorded by Spring Cloud Task.

Running the example

At this point, your application should work. Since this application is Spring Boot based, we can run it from the command line via the command $ mvn spring-boot:run from the root of our applicaiton:

$ mvn clean spring-boot:run
....... . . .
....... . . . (Maven log output here)
....... . . .


  .   ____          _            __ _ _
 /\\ / ___'_ __ _ _(_)_ __  __ _ \ \ \ \
( ( )\___ | '_ | '_| | '_ \/ _` | \ \ \ \
 \\/  ___)| |_)| | | | | || (_| |  ) ) ) )
  '  |____| .__|_| |_|_| |_\__, | / / / /
 =========|_|==============|___/=/_/_/_/
 :: Spring Boot ::        (v1.3.2.RELEASE)

2016-01-25 11:08:10.183  INFO 12943 --- [           main] com.example.SampleTask                   : Starting SampleTask on Michaels-MacBook-Pro-2.local with PID 12943 (/Users/mminella/Documents/IntelliJWorkspace/spring-cloud-task-example/target/classes started by mminella in /Users/mminella/Documents/IntelliJWorkspace/spring-cloud-task-example)
2016-01-25 11:08:10.185  INFO 12943 --- [           main] com.example.SampleTask                   : No active profile set, falling back to default profiles: default
2016-01-25 11:08:10.226  INFO 12943 --- [           main] s.c.a.AnnotationConfigApplicationContext : Refreshing org.springframework.context.annotation.AnnotationConfigApplicationContext@2a2c3676: startup date [Mon Jan 25 11:08:10 CST 2016]; root of context hierarchy
2016-01-25 11:08:11.051  INFO 12943 --- [           main] o.s.j.e.a.AnnotationMBeanExporter        : Registering beans for JMX exposure on startup
2016-01-25 11:08:11.065  INFO 12943 --- [           main] o.s.c.t.r.support.SimpleTaskRepository   : Creating: TaskExecution{executionId=0, externalExecutionID='null', exitCode=0, taskName='application', startTime=Mon Jan 25 11:08:11 CST 2016, endTime=null, statusCode='null', exitMessage='null', parameters=[]}
Hello World!
2016-01-25 11:08:11.071  INFO 12943 --- [           main] com.example.SampleTask                   : Started SampleTask in 1.095 seconds (JVM running for 3.826)
2016-01-25 11:08:11.220  INFO 12943 --- [       Thread-1] s.c.a.AnnotationConfigApplicationContext : Closing org.springframework.context.annotation.AnnotationConfigApplicationContext@2a2c3676: startup date [Mon Jan 25 11:08:10 CST 2016]; root of context hierarchy
2016-01-25 11:08:11.222  INFO 12943 --- [       Thread-1] o.s.c.t.r.support.SimpleTaskRepository   : Updating: TaskExecution{executionId=0, externalExecutionID='null', exitCode=0, taskName='application', startTime=Mon Jan 25 11:08:11 CST 2016, endTime=Mon Jan 25 11:08:11 CST 2016, statusCode='null', exitMessage='null', parameters=[]}
2016-01-25 11:08:11.222  INFO 12943 --- [       Thread-1] o.s.j.e.a.AnnotationMBeanExporter        : Unregistering JMX-exposed beans on shutdown

If you notice, there are three lines of interest in the above output:

  • SimpleTaskRepository logged out the creation of the entry in the TaskRepository.

  • The execution of our CommandLineRunner, demonstrated by the "Helo World!" output.

  • SimpleTaskREpository logging the completion of the task in the TaskRepository.

Features

This section goes into more detail about Spring Cloud Task. How to use it, how to configure it, as well as the appropriate extension points are all covered in this section.

The lifecycle of a Spring Cloud Task

In most cases, the modern cloud environment is designed around the execution of processes that are not expected to end. If they do, they are typically restarted. While most platforms do have some method to execute a process that isn’t restarted when it ends, the results of that execution are typically not maintained in a consumable way. Spring Cloud Task brings the ability to execute short lived processes in an environment and record the results. This allows for a microservices architecture around short lived processes as well as longer running services.

While this functionality is useful in a cloud environment, the same issues can arise in a traditional deployment model as well. When executing Spring Boot applications via a scheduler like cron, it can be useful to be able to monitor the results of the application after it’s completion.

A Spring Cloud Task takes the approach that a Spring Boot application can have a start and an end and still be successful. Batch applications are just one example of where short lived processes can be helpful. Spring Cloud Task records lifecycle events of a given task.

The lifecycle consists of a single task execution. This is a physical execution of a Spring Boot application configured to be a task (annotated with the @EnableTask annotation).

At the beginning of a task, an entry in the TaskRepository is created recording the start event. This event is triggered via the ContextRefreshEvent being triggered by Spring Framework.

Note
As Spring Cloud Task is expected to consist of a single application context. If multiple application contexts are used (parent/child relationships for example), the first ContextRefreshEvent that is published by Spring will be recorded as the start of the task.
Note
The recording of a task will only occur upon the successful bootstrapping of an ApplicationContext. If the context fails to bootstrap at all, the task’s execution will not be recorded.

Upon completion of all of the *Runner#run calls from Spring Boot or the failure of an ApplicationContext (indicated via a ApplicationFailedEvent), the task execution is updated in the repository with the results.

The TaskExecution

The information stored in the TaskRepository is modeled in the TaskExecution class and consists of the following information:

Field Description

executionid

The unique id for the task’s execution.

exitCode

The exit code generated from an ExitCodeExceptionMapper implementation. If there is no exit code generated, but an ApplicationFailedEvent is thrown, 1 is set. Otherwise, it’s assumed to be 0.

taskName

The name for the task as determined by the configured TaskNameResolver.

starTime

The time the task was started as indicated by the ContextRefreshEvent.

endTime

The time the task was completed as indicated by the ContextClosedEvent.

exitMessage

Any information available at the time of exit. If an exception is the cause of the end of the task (as indicated via an ApplicationFailedEvent), the stack trace for that exception will be stored here.

parameters

A List of the string parameters as they were passed into the executable boot application.

Mapping Exit Codes

When a task completes, it will want to return an exit code to the OS. If we take a look at our original example, we can see that we are not controlling that aspect of our application. So if an exception is thrown, the JVM will return a code that may or may not be of any use to you in the debugging of that.

As such, Spring Boot provides an interface, ExitCodeExceptionMapper that allows you to map uncaught exceptions to exit codes. This allows you to be able to indicate at that level what went wrong. Also, by mapping exit codes in this manor, Spring Cloud Task will record the exit code returned.

Configuration

Spring Cloud Task provides an out of the box configuration as defined in the DefaultTaskConfigurer and SimpleTaskConfiguration. This section will walk through the defaults as well as how to customize Spring Cloud Task for your needs

DataSource

Spring Cloud Task utilizes a datasource for storing the results of task executions. By default, we provide an in memory instance of H2 to provide a simple method of bootstrapping development. However, in a production environment, you’ll want to configure your own DataSource.

If your application utilizes only a single DataSource and that will serve as both your business schema as well as the task repository, all you need to do is provide any DataSource (via Spring Boot’s configuration conventions is the easiest way). This will be automatically used by Spring Cloud Task for the repository.

If your application utilizes more than one DataSource, you’ll need to configure the task repository with the appropriate DataSource. This customization can be done via an implementation of the TaskConfigurer.

TaskConfigurer

The TaskConfigurer is a strategy interface allowing for users to customize the way components of Spring Cloud Task are configured. By default, we provide the DefaultTaskConfigurer that provides logical defaults (Map based in memory components useful for development if no DataSource is provided and JDBC based components if there is a DataSource available.

The TaskConfigurer allows the configuration of three main components:

Component Description Default (provided by DefaultTaskConfigurer)

TaskRepository

The implementation of the TaskRepository to be used.

SimpleTaskRepository

TaskExplorer

The implementation of the TaskExplorer (a component for read only access to the task repository) to be used.

SimpleTaskExplorer

PlatformTransactionManager

A transaction manager to be used when executing updates for tasks.

DataSourceTransactionManager if a DataSource is used, ResourcelessTransactionManager if it is not.

Task Name

In most cases, the name of the task will be the application name as configured via Spring Boot. However, there are some cases, where you may want to map the run of a task to a different name. Spring Data Flow is an example of this (where you want the task to be run with the name of the task definition). Because of this, we offer the ability to customize how the task is named via the TaskNameResolver interface.

By default, Spring Cloud Task provides the SimpleTaskNameResolver which will use the following options (in order of precedence):

  1. A Spring Boot property (configured any of the ways Spring Boot allows) spring.cloud.task.name.

  2. The application name as resolved using Spring Boot’s rules (obtained via ApplicationContext#getId).

Spring Cloud Bus

Spring Cloud Bus links nodes of a distributed system with a lightweight message broker. This can then be used to broadcast state changes (e.g. configuration changes) or other management instructions. A key idea is that the Bus is like a distributed Actuator for a Spring Boot application that is scaled out, but it can also be used as a communication channel between apps. The only implementation currently is with an AMQP broker as the transport, but the same basic feature set (and some more depending on the transport) is on the roadmap for other transports.

Quick Start

Spring Cloud Bus works by adding Spring Boot autconfiguration if it detects itself on the classpath. All you need to do to enable the bus is to add spring-cloud-starter-bus-amqp to your dependency management and Spring Cloud takes care of the rest. Make sure RabbitMQ is available and configured to provide a ConnectionFactory: running on localhost you shouldn’t have to do anything, but if you are running remotely use Spring Cloud Connectors, or Spring Boot conventions to define the broker credentials, e.g.

application.yml
spring:
  rabbitmq:
    host: mybroker.com
    port: 5672
    username: user
    password: secret

The bus currently supports sending messages to all nodes listening or all nodes for a particular service (as defined by Eureka). More selector criteria will be added in the future (ie. only service X nodes in data center Y, etc…​). The http endpoints are under the /bus/* actuator namespace. There are currently two implemented. The first, /bus/env, sends key/values pairs to update each nodes Spring Environment. The second, /bus/refresh, will reload each application’s configuration, just as if they had all been pinged on their /refresh endpoint.

Addressing an Instance

The HTTP endpoints accept a "destination" parameter, e.g. "/bus/refresh?destination=customers:9000", where the destination is an ApplicationContext ID. If the ID is owned by an instance on the Bus then it will process the message and all other instances will ignore it. Spring Boot sets the ID for you in the ContextIdApplicationContextInitializer to a combination of the spring.application.name, active profiles and server.port by default.

Addressing all instances of a service

The "destination" parameter is used in a Spring PathMatcher (with the path separator as a colon :) to determine if an instance will process the message. Using the example from above, "/bus/refresh?destination=customers:**" will target all instances of the "customers" service regardless of the profiles and ports set as the ApplicationContext ID.

Application Context ID must be unique

The bus tries to eliminate processing an event twice, once from the original ApplicationEvent and once from the queue. To do this, it checks the sending application context id againts the current application context id. If multiple instances of a service have the same application context id, events will not be processed. Running on a local machine, each service will be on a different port and that will be part of the application context id. Cloud Foundry supplies an index to differentiate. To ensure that the application context id is the unique, set spring.application.index to something unique for each instance of a service. For example, in lattice, set spring.application.index=${INSTANCE_INDEX} in application.properties (or bootstrap.properties if using configserver).

Customizing the Message Broker

Spring Cloud Bus uses Spring Cloud Stream to broadcast the messages so to get messages to flow you only need to include the binder implementation of your choice in the classpath. There are convenient starters specifically for the bus with AMQP, Kafka and Redis (spring-cloud-starter-bus-[amqp,kafka,redis]). Generally speaking Spring Cloud Stream relies on Spring Boot autoconfiguration conventions for configuring middleware, so for instance the AMQP broker address can be changed with spring.rabbitmq.* configuration properties. Spring Cloud Bus has a handful of native configuration properties in spring.cloud.bus.* (e.g. spring.cloud.bus.destination is the name of the topic to use the the externall middleware). Normally the defaults will suffice.

To lean more about how to customize the message broker settings consult the Spring Cloud Stream documentation.

Tracing Bus Events

Bus events (subclasses of RemoteApplicationEvent) can be traced by setting spring.cloud.bus.trace.enabled=true. If you do this then the Spring Boot TraceRepository (if it is present) will show each event sent and all the acks from each service instance. Example (from the /trace endpoint):

{
  "timestamp": "2015-11-26T10:24:44.411+0000",
  "info": {
    "signal": "spring.cloud.bus.ack",
    "type": "RefreshRemoteApplicationEvent",
    "id": "c4d374b7-58ea-4928-a312-31984def293b",
    "origin": "stores:8081",
    "destination": "*:**"
  }
  },
  {
  "timestamp": "2015-11-26T10:24:41.864+0000",
  "info": {
    "signal": "spring.cloud.bus.sent",
    "type": "RefreshRemoteApplicationEvent",
    "id": "c4d374b7-58ea-4928-a312-31984def293b",
    "origin": "customers:9000",
    "destination": "*:**"
  }
  },
  {
  "timestamp": "2015-11-26T10:24:41.862+0000",
  "info": {
    "signal": "spring.cloud.bus.ack",
    "type": "RefreshRemoteApplicationEvent",
    "id": "c4d374b7-58ea-4928-a312-31984def293b",
    "origin": "customers:9000",
    "destination": "*:**"
  }
}

This trace shows that a RefreshRemoteApplicationEvent was sent from customers:9000, broadcast to all services, and it was received (acked) by customers:9000 and stores:8081.

To handle the ack signals yourself you could add an @EventListener for the AckRemoteAppplicationEvent and SentApplicationEvent types to your app (and enable tracing). Or you could tap into the TraceRepository and mine the data from there.

Note
Any Bus application can trace acks, but sometimes it will be useful to do this in a central service that can do more complex queries on the data. Or forward it to a specialized tracing service.

Spring Cloud Sleuth

Spring Cloud Sleuth

Spring Cloud Sleuth implements a distributed tracing solution for Spring Cloud.

Terminology

Spring Cloud Sleuth borrows Dapper’s terminology.

Span: The basic unit of work. For example, sending an RPC is a new span, as is sending a response to an RPC. Span’s are identified by a unique 64-bit ID for the span and another 64-bit ID for the trace the span is a part of. Spans also have other data, such as descriptions, timestamped events, key-value annotations (tags), the ID of the span that caused them, and process ID’s (normally IP address).

Spans are started and stopped, and they keep track of their timing information. Once you create a span, you must stop it at some point in the future.

Trace: A set of spans forming a tree-like structure. For example, if you are running a distributed big-data store, a trace might be formed by a put request.

Features

  • Adds trace and span ids to the Slf4J MDC, so you can extract all the logs from a given trace or span in a log aggregator. Example logs:

    2016-02-02 15:30:57.902  INFO [bar,6bfd228dc00d216b,6bfd228dc00d216b,false] 23030 --- [nio-8081-exec-3] ...
    2016-02-02 15:30:58.372 ERROR [bar,6bfd228dc00d216b,6bfd228dc00d216b,false] 23030 --- [nio-8081-exec-3] ...
    2016-02-02 15:31:01.936  INFO [bar,46ab0d418373cbc9,46ab0d418373cbc9,false] 23030 --- [nio-8081-exec-4] ...

    (notice the [appname,traceId,spanId,exportable] entries from the MDC).

  • Optionally log span data in JSON format for harvesting in a log aggregator (set spring.sleuth.log.json.enabled=true).

  • Provides an abstraction over common distributed tracing data models: traces, spans (forming a DAG), annotations, key-value annotations. Loosely based on HTrace, but Zipkin (Dapper) compatible.

  • Instruments common ingress and egress points from Spring applications (servlet filter, rest template, scheduled actions, message channels, zuul filters, feign client).

  • If spring-cloud-sleuth-zipkin then the app will generate and collect Zipkin-compatible traces (using Brave). By default it sends them via HTTP to a Zipkin server on localhost (port 9411). Configure the location of the service using spring.zipkin.[host,port].

  • If spring-cloud-sleuth-stream then the app will generate and collect traces via Spring Cloud Stream. Your app automatically becomes a producer of tracer messages that are sent over your broker of choice (e.g. RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, Redis).

If using Zipkin or Stream, configure the percentage of spans exported using spring.sleuth.sampler.percentage (default 0.1, i.e. 10%).

Sampling

In distributed tracing the data volumes can be very high so sampling can be important (you usually don’t need to export all spans to get a good picture of what is happening). Spring Cloud Sleuth has a Sampler strategy that you can implement to take control of the sampling algorithm. Samplers do not stop span (correlation) ids from being generated, but they do prevent the tags and events being attached and exported. By default you get a strategy that continues to trace if a span is already active, but new ones are always marked as non-exportable. If all your apps run with this sampler you will see traces in logs, but not in any remote store. For testing the default is often enough, and it probably is all you need if you are only using the logs (e.g. with an ELK aggregator). If you are exporting span data to Zipkin or Spring Cloud Stream, there is also an AlwaysSampler that exports everything and a PercentageBasedSampler that samples a fixed fraction of spans.

Note
the PercentageBasedSampler is the default if you are using spring-cloud-sleuth-zipkin or spring-cloud-sleuth-stream. You can configure the exports using spring.sleuth.sampler.percentage.

A sampler can be installed just by creating a bean definition, e.g:

@Bean
public Sampler<?> defaultSampler() {
    return new AlwaysSampler();
}

Instrumentation

Spring Cloud Sleuth instruments all your Spring application automatically, so you shouldn’t have to do anything to activate it. The instrumentation is added using a variety of technologies according to the stack that is available, e.g. for a servlet web application we use a Filter, and for Spring Integration we use ChannelInterceptors.

You can customize the keys used in span tags. To limit the volume of span data, by default an HTTP request will be tagged only with a handful of metadata like the status code, host and URL. You can add request headers by configuring spring.sleuth.keys.http.headers (a list of header names).

Note
Remember that tags are only collected and exported if there is a Sampler that allows it (by default there is not, so there is no danger of accidentally collecting too much data without configuring something).

Span Data as Messages

You can accumulate and send span data over Spring Cloud Stream by including the spring-cloud-sleuth-stream jar as a dependency, and adding a Channel Binder implementation (e.g. spring-cloud-starter-stream-rabbit for RabbitMQ or spring-cloud-starter-stream-kafka for Kafka). This will automatically turn your app into a producer of messages with payload type Spans.

Zipkin Consumer

There is a special convenience annotation for setting up a message consumer for the Span data and pushing it into a Zipkin SpanStore. This application

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableZipkinStreamServer
public class Consumer {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(Consumer.class, args);
  }
}

will listen for the Span data on whatever transport you provide via a Spring Cloud Stream Binder (e.g. include spring-cloud-starter-stream-rabbit for RabbitMQ, and similar starters exist for Redis and Kafka). The app will also be a Zipkin query server, so you can point a standard Zipkin UI at it (e.g. run the consumer app on port 9411 if you want the query server on the same host and the default configuration).

The deafult SpanStore is in-memory (good for demos and getting started quickly). For a more robust solution you can add MySQL and spring-boot-starter-jdbc to your classpath and enable the JDBC SpanStore via configuration, e.g.:

spring:
  rabbitmq:
    host: ${RABBIT_HOST:localhost}
  datasource:
    schema: classpath:/mysql.sql
    url: jdbc:mysql://${MYSQL_HOST:localhost}/test
    username: root
    password: root
# Switch this on to create the schema on startup:
    initialize: true
    continueOnError: true
  sleuth:
    enabled: false
zipkin:
  store:
    type: mysql
Note
The @EnableZipkinStreamServer is also annotated with @EnableZipkinServer so the process will also expose the standard Zipkin server endpoints for collecting spans over HTTP, and for querying in the Zipkin Web UI.

Custom Consumer

A custom consumer can also easily be implemented using spring-cloud-sleuth-stream and binding to the SleuthSink. Example:

@EnableBinding(SleuthSink.class)
@SpringBootApplication(exclude = SleuthStreamAutoConfiguration.class)
@MessageEndpoint
public class Consumer {

    @ServiceActivator(inputChannel = SleuthSink.INPUT)
    public void sink(Spans input) throws Exception {
        // ... process spans
    }
}
Note
the sample consumer application above explicitly excludes SleuthStreamAutoConfiguration so it doesn’t send messages to itself, but this is optional (you might actually want to trace requests into the consumer app).

Spring Cloud Consul

This project provides Consul integrations for Spring Boot apps through autoconfiguration and binding to the Spring Environment and other Spring programming model idioms. With a few simple annotations you can quickly enable and configure the common patterns inside your application and build large distributed systems with Consul based components. The patterns provided include Service Discovery, Control Bus and Configuration. Intelligent Routing (Zuul) and Client Side Load Balancing (Ribbon), Circuit Breaker (Hystrix) are provided by integration with Spring Cloud Netflix.

Install Consul

Please see the installation documentation for instructions on how to install Consul.

Consul Agent

A Consul Agent client must be available to all Spring Cloud Consul applications. By default, the Agent client is expected to be at localhost:8500. See the Agent documentation for specifics on how to start an Agent client and how to connect to a cluster of Consul Agent Servers. For development, after you have installed consul, you may start a Consul Agent using the following command:

./src/main/bash/local_run_consul.sh

This will start an agent in server mode on port 8500, with the ui available at http://localhost:8500

Service Discovery with Consul

Service Discovery is one of the key tenets of a microservice based architecture. Trying to hand configure each client or some form of convention can be very difficult to do and can be very brittle. Consul provides Service Discovery services via an HTTP API and DNS. Spring Cloud Consul leverages the HTTP API for service registration and discovery. This does not prevent non-Spring Cloud applications from leveraging the DNS interface. Consul Agents servers are run in a cluster that communicates via a gossip protocol and uses the Raft consensus protocol.

Registering with Consul

When a client registers with Consul, it provides meta-data about itself such as host and port, id, name and tags. An HTTP Check is created by default that Consul hits the /health endpoint every 10 seconds. If the health check fails, the service instance is marked as critical.

Example Consul client:

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableDiscoveryClient
@RestController
public class Application {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String home() {
        return "Hello world";
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new SpringApplicationBuilder(Application.class).web(true).run(args);
    }

}

(i.e. utterly normal Spring Boot app). If the Consul client is located somewhere other than localhost:8500, the configuration is required to locate the client. Example:

application.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      host: localhost
      port: 8500
Caution
If you use Spring Cloud Consul Config, the above values will need to be placed in bootstrap.yml instead of application.yml.

The default service name, instance id and port, taken from the Environment, are ${spring.application.name}, the Spring Context ID and ${server.port} respectively.

@EnableDiscoveryClient make the app into both a Consul "service" (i.e. it registers itself) and a "client" (i.e. it can query Consul to locate other services).

HTTP Health Check

The health check for a Consul instance defaults to "/health", which is the default locations of a useful endpoint in a Spring Boot Actuator application. You need to change these, even for an Actuator application if you use a non-default context path or servlet path (e.g. server.servletPath=/foo) or management endpoint path (e.g. management.contextPath=/admin). The interval that Consul uses to check the health endpoint may also be configured. "10s" and "1m" represent 10 seconds and 1 minute respectively. Example:

application.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      discovery:
        healthCheckPath: ${management.contextPath}/health
        healthCheckInterval: 15s

Making the Consul Instance ID Unique

By default a consul instance is registered with an ID that is equal to its Spring Application Context ID. By default, the Spring Application Context ID is ${spring.application.name}:comma,separated,profiles:${server.port}. For most cases, this will allow multiple instances of one service to run on one machine. If further uniqueness is required, Using Spring Cloud you can override this by providing a unique identifier in spring.cloud.consul.discovery.instanceId. For example:

application.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      discovery:
        instanceId: ${spring.application.name}:${spring.application.instance_id:${random.value}}

With this metadata, and multiple service instances deployed on localhost, the random value will kick in there to make the instance unique. In Cloudfoundry the spring.application.instance_id will be populated automatically in a Spring Boot Actuator application, so the random value will not be needed.

Using the DiscoveryClient

Spring Cloud has support for Feign (a REST client builder) and also Spring RestTemplate using the logical service names instead of physical URLs.

You can also use the org.springframework.cloud.client.discovery.DiscoveryClient which provides a simple API for discovery clients that is not specific to Netflix, e.g.

@Autowired
private DiscoveryClient discoveryClient;

public String serviceUrl() {
    List<ServiceInstance> list = client.getInstances("STORES");
    if (list != null && list.size() > 0 ) {
        return list.get(0).getUri();
    }
    return null;
}

Distributed Configuration with Consul

Consul provides a Key/Value Store for storing configuration and other metadata. Spring Cloud Consul Config is an alternative to the Config Server and Client. Configuration is loaded into the Spring Environment during the special "bootstrap" phase. Configuration is stored in the /config folder by default. Multiple PropertySource instances are created based on the application’s name and the active profiles that mimicks the Spring Cloud Config order of resolving properties. For example, an application with the name "testApp" and with the "dev" profile will have the following property sources created:

config/testApp,dev/
config/testApp/
config/application,dev/
config/application/

The most specific property source is at the top, with the least specific at the bottom. Properties is the config/application folder are applicable to all applications using consul for configuration. Properties in the config/testApp folder are only available to the instances of the service named "testApp".

Configuration is currently read on startup of the application. Sending a HTTP POST to /refresh will cause the configuration to be reloaded. Watching the key value store (which Consul supports) is not currently possible, but will be a future addition to this project.

How to activate

Including a dependency on org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-consul-config will enable auto-configuration that will setup Spring Cloud Consul Config.

Customizing

Consul Config may be customized using the following properties:

bootstrap.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      config:
        enabled: true
        prefix: configuration
        defaultContext: apps
        profileSeparator: '::'
  • enabled setting this value to "false" disables Consul Config

  • prefix sets the base folder for configuration values

  • defaultContext sets the folder name used by all applications

  • profileSeparator sets the value of the separator used to separate the profile name in property sources with profiles

YAML or Properties with Config

It may be more convenient to store a blob of properties in YAML or Properties format as opposed to individual key/value pairs. Set the spring.cloud.consul.config.format property to YAML or PROPERTIES. For example to use YAML:

bootstrap.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      config:
        format: YAML

YAML must be set in the appropriate data key in consul. Using the defaults above the keys would look like:

config/testApp,dev/data
config/testApp/data
config/application,dev/data
config/application/data

You could store a YAML document in any of the keys listed above.

You can change the data key using spring.cloud.consul.config.data-key.

Consul Retry

If you expect that the consul agent may occasionally be unavailable when your app starts, you can ask it to keep trying after a failure. You need to add spring-retry and spring-boot-starter-aop to your classpath. The default behaviour is to retry 6 times with an initial backoff interval of 1000ms and an exponential multiplier of 1.1 for subsequent backoffs. You can configure these properties (and others) using spring.cloud.consul.retry.* configuration properties. This works with both Spring Cloud Consul Config and Discovery registration.

Tip
To take full control of the retry add a @Bean of type RetryOperationsInterceptor with id "consulRetryInterceptor". Spring Retry has a RetryInterceptorBuilder that makes it easy to create one.

Spring Cloud Bus with Consul

TODO: document Spring Cloud Consul Bus

Circuit Breaker with Hystrix

Applications can use the Hystrix Circuit Breaker provided by the Spring Cloud Netflix project by including this starter in the projects pom.xml: spring-cloud-starter-hystrix. Hystrix doesn’t depend on the Netflix Discovery Client. The @EnableHystrix annotation should be placed on a configuration class (usually the main class). Then methods can be annotated with @HystrixCommand to be protected by a circuit breaker. See the documentation for more details.

Hystrix metrics aggregation with Turbine and Consul

Turbine (provided by the Spring Cloud Netflix project), aggregates multiple instances Hystrix metrics streams, so the dashboard can display an aggregate view. Turbine uses the DiscoveryClient interface to lookup relevant instances. To use Turbine with Spring Cloud Consul, configure the Turbine application in a manner similar to the following examples:

pom.xml
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-netflix-turbine</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-consul-discovery</artifactId>
</dependency>

Notice that the Turbine dependency is not a starter. The turbine starter includes support for Netflix Eureka.

application.yml
spring.application.name: turbine
applications: consulhystrixclient
turbine:
  aggregator:
    clusterConfig: ${applications}
  appConfig: ${applications}

The clusterConfig and appConfig sections must match, so it’s useful to put the comma-separated list of service ID’s into a separate configuration property.

Turbine.java
@EnableTurbine
@EnableDiscoveryClient
@SpringBootApplication
public class Turbine {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(DemoturbinecommonsApplication.class, args);
    }
}

Spring Cloud Zookeeper

This project provides Zookeeper integrations for Spring Boot apps through autoconfiguration and binding to the Spring Environment and other Spring programming model idioms. With a few simple annotations you can quickly enable and configure the common patterns inside your application and build large distributed systems with Zookeeper based components. The patterns provided include Service Discovery and Configuration. Intelligent Routing (Zuul) and Client Side Load Balancing (Ribbon), Circuit Breaker (Hystrix) are provided by integration with Spring Cloud Netflix.

Install Zookeeper

Please see the installation documentation for instructions on how to install Zookeeper.

Service Discovery with Zookeeper

Service Discovery is one of the key tenets of a microservice based architecture. Trying to hand configure each client or some form of convention can be very difficult to do and can be very brittle. Curator(A java library for Zookeeper) provides Service Discovery services via Service Discovery Extension. Spring Cloud Zookeeper leverages this extension for service registration and discovery.

How to activate

Including a dependency on org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-zookeeper-discovery will enable auto-configuration that will setup Spring Cloud Zookeeper Discovery.

Registering with Zookeeper

When a client registers with Zookeeper, it provides meta-data about itself such as host and port, id and name.

Example Zookeeper client:

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableDiscoveryClient
@RestController
public class Application {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String home() {
        return "Hello world";
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new SpringApplicationBuilder(Application.class).web(true).run(args);
    }

}

(i.e. utterly normal Spring Boot app). If Zookeeper is located somewhere other than localhost:2181, the configuration is required to locate the server. Example:

application.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    zookeeper:
      connect-string: localhost:2181
Caution
If you use Spring Cloud Zookeeper Config, the above values will need to be placed in bootstrap.yml instead of application.yml.

The default service name, instance id and port, taken from the Environment, are ${spring.application.name}, the Spring Context ID and ${server.port} respectively.

@EnableDiscoveryClient makes the app into both a Zookeeper "service" (i.e. it registers itself) and a "client" (i.e. it can query Zookeeper to locate other services).

Using the DiscoveryClient

Spring Cloud has support for Feign (a REST client builder) and also Spring RestTemplate using the logical service names instead of physical URLs.

You can also use the org.springframework.cloud.client.discovery.DiscoveryClient which provides a simple API for discovery clients that is not specific to Netflix, e.g.

@Autowired
private DiscoveryClient discoveryClient;

public String serviceUrl() {
    List<ServiceInstance> list = discoveryClient.getInstances("STORES");
    if (list != null && list.size() > 0 ) {
        return list.get(0).getUri().toString();
    }
    return null;
}

Using the Zookeeper Dependencies

Spring Cloud Zookeeper gives you a possibility to provide dependencies of your application as properties. As dependencies you can understand other applications that are registered in Zookeeper and which you would like to call via Feign (a REST client builder) and also Spring RestTemplate.

You can also benefit from the Zookeeper Dependency Watchers functionality that lets you control and monitor what is the state of your dependencies and decide what to do with that.

How to activate Zookeeper Dependencies

  • Including a dependency on org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-zookeeper-discovery will enable auto-configuration that will setup Spring Cloud Zookeeper Dependencies.

  • In addition to that you have to set the property spring.cloud.zookeeper.dependencies.enabled to true (defaults to true if not set explicitly).

  • You have to have the spring.cloud.zookeeper.dependencies section properly set up - check the subsequent section for more details.

Setting up Zookeeper Dependencies

Let’s take a closer look at an example of dependencies representation:

application.yml
spring.application.name: yourServiceName
spring.cloud.zookeeper:
  dependencies:
    newsletter:
      path: /path/where/newsletter/has/registered/in/zookeeper
      loadBalancerType: ROUND_ROBIN
      contentTypeTemplate: application/vnd.newsletter.$version+json
      version: v1
      headers:
        header1:
            - value1
        header2:
            - value2
      required: false
      stubs: org.springframework:foo:stubs
    mailing:
      path: /path/where/mailing/has/registered/in/zookeeper
      loadBalancerType: ROUND_ROBIN
      contentTypeTemplate: application/vnd.mailing.$version+json
      version: v1
      required: true

Let’s now go through each part of the dependency one by one. The root property name is spring.cloud.zookeeper.dependencies.

Aliases

Below the root property you have to represent each dependency has by an alias due to the constraints of Ribbon (the application id has to be placed in the URL thus you can’t pass any complex path like /foo/bar/name). The alias will be the name that you will use instead of serviceId for DiscoveryClient, Feign or RestTemplate.

In the aforementioned examples the aliases are newsletter and mailing. Example of Feign usage with newsletter would be:

@FeignClient("newsletter")
public interface NewsletterService {
        @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/newsletter")
        String getNewsletters();
}

Path

Represented by path yaml property.

Path is the path under which the dependency is registered under Zookeeper. Like presented before Ribbon operates on URLs thus this path is not compliant with its requirement. That is why Spring Cloud Zookeeper maps the alias to the proper path.

Load balancer type

Represented by loadBalancerType yaml property.

If you know what kind of load balancing strategy has to be applied when calling this particular dependency then you can provide it in the yaml file and it will be automatically applied. You can choose one of the following load balancing strategies

  • STICKY - once chosen the instance will always be called

  • RANDOM - picks an instance randomly

  • ROUND_ROBIN - iterates over instances over and over again

Content-Type template and version

Represented by contentTypeTemplate and version yaml property.

If you version your api via the Content-Type header then you don’t want to add this header to each of your requests. Also if you want to call a new version of the API you don’t want to roam around your code to bump up the API version. That’s why you can provide a contentTypeTemplate with a special $version placeholder. That placeholder will be filled by the value of the version yaml property. Let’s take a look at an example.

Having the following contentTypeTemplate:

application/vnd.newsletter.$version+json

and the following version:

v1

Will result in setting up of a Content-Type header for each request:

application/vnd.newsletter.v1+json

Default headers

Represented by headers map in yaml

Sometimes each call to a dependency requires setting up of some default headers. In order not to do that in code you can set them up in the yaml file. Having the following headers section:

headers:
    Accept:
        - text/html
        - application/xhtml+xml
    Cache-Control:
        - no-cache

Results in adding the Accept and Cache-Control headers with appropriate list of values in your HTTP request.

Obligatory dependencies

Represented by required property in yaml

If one of your dependencies is required to be up and running when your application is booting then it’s enough to set up the required: true property in the yaml file.

If your application can’t localize the required dependency during boot time it will throw an exception and the Spring Context will fail to set up. In other words your application won’t be able to start if the required dependency is not registered in Zookeeper.

You can read more about Spring Cloud Zookeeper Presence Checker in the following sections.

Stubs

You can provide a colon separated path to the JAR containing stubs of the dependency. Example

stubs: org.springframework:foo:stubs

means that for a particular dependencies can be found under:

  • groupId: org.springframework

  • artifactId: foo

  • classifier: stubs - this is the default value

This is actually equal to

stubs: org.springframework:foo

since stubs is the default classifier.

Configuring Spring Cloud Zookeeper Dependencies

There is a bunch of properties that you can set to enable / disable parts of Zookeeper Dependencies functionalities.

  • spring.cloud.zookeeper.dependencies - if you don’t set this property you won’t benefit from Zookeeper Dependencies

  • spring.cloud.zookeeper.dependencies.ribbon.enabled (enabled by default) - Ribbon requires explicit global configuration or a particular one for a dependency. By turning on this property runtime load balancing strategy resolution is possible and you can profit from the loadBalancerType section of the Zookeeper Dependencies. The configuration that needs this property has an implementation of LoadBalancerClient that delegates to the ILoadBalancer presented in the next bullet

  • spring.cloud.zookeeper.dependencies.ribbon.loadbalancer (enabled by default) - thanks to this property the custom ILoadBalancer knows that the part of the URI passed to Ribbon might actually be the alias that has to be resolved to a proper path in Zookeeper. Without this property you won’t be able to register applications under nested paths.

  • spring.cloud.zookeeper.dependencies.headers.enabled (enabled by default) - this property registers such a RibbonClient that automatically will append appropriate headers and content types with version as presented in the Dependency configuration. Without this setting of those two parameters will not be operational.

  • spring.cloud.zookeeper.dependencies.resttemplate.enabled (enabled by default) - when enabled will modify the request headers of @LoadBalanced annotated RestTemplate so that it passes headers and content type with version set in Dependency configuration. Wihtout this setting of those two parameters will not be operational.

Spring Cloud Zookeeper Dependency Watcher

The Dependency Watcher mechanism allows you to register listeners to your dependencies. The functionality is in fact an implementation of the Observator pattern. When a dependency changes its state (UP or DOWN) then some custom logic can be applied.

How to activate

Spring Cloud Zookeeper Dependencies functionality needs to be enabled to profit from Dependency Watcher mechanism.

Registering a listener

In order to register a listener you have to implement an interface org.springframework.cloud.zookeeper.discovery.watcher.DependencyWatcherListener and register it as a bean. The interface gives you one method:

    /**
    * Method executed upon state change of a dependency
    *
    * @param dependencyName - alias from microservice configuration {@see ZookeeperDependencies}
    * @param newState
    */
    void stateChanged(String dependencyName, DependencyState newState);

If you want to register a listener for a particular dependency then the dependencyName would be the discriminator for your concrete implementation. newState will provide you with information whether your dependency has changed to CONNECTED or DISCONNECTED.

Presence Checker

Bound with Dependency Watcher is the functionality called Presence Checker. It allows you to provide custom behaviour upon booting of your application to react accordingly to the state of your dependencies.

The default implementation of the abstract org.springframework.cloud.zookeeper.discovery.watcher.presence.DependencyPresenceOnStartupVerifier class is the org.springframework.cloud.zookeeper.discovery.watcher.presence.DefaultDependencyPresenceOnStartupVerifier which works in the following way.

  • If the dependency is marked us required and it’s not in Zookeeper then upon booting your application will throw an exception and shutdown

  • If dependency is not required the org.springframework.cloud.zookeeper.discovery.watcher.presence.LogMissingDependencyChecker will log that application is missing at WARN level

The functionality can be overriden since the DefaultDependencyPresenceOnStartupVerifier is registered only when there is no bean of DependencyPresenceOnStartupVerifier.

Distributed Configuration with Zookeeper

Zookeeper provides a hierarchical namespace that allows clients to store arbitrary data, such as configuration data. Spring Cloud Zookeeper Config is an alternative to the Config Server and Client. Configuration is loaded into the Spring Environment during the special "bootstrap" phase. Configuration is stored in the /config namespace by default. Multiple PropertySource instances are created based on the application’s name and the active profiles that mimicks the Spring Cloud Config order of resolving properties. For example, an application with the name "testApp" and with the "dev" profile will have the following property sources created:

config/testApp,dev
config/testApp
config/application,dev
config/application

The most specific property source is at the top, with the least specific at the bottom. Properties is the config/application namespace are applicable to all applications using zookeeper for configuration. Properties in the config/testApp namespace are only available to the instances of the service named "testApp".

Configuration is currently read on startup of the application. Sending a HTTP POST to /refresh will cause the configuration to be reloaded. Watching the configuration namespace (which Zookeeper supports) is not currently implemented, but will be a future addition to this project.

How to activate

Including a dependency on org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-zookeeper-config will enable auto-configuration that will setup Spring Cloud Zookeeper Config.

Customizing

Zookeeper Config may be customized using the following properties:

bootstrap.yml
spring:
  cloud:
    zookeeper:
      config:
        enabled: true
        root: configuration
        defaultContext: apps
        profileSeparator: '::'
  • enabled setting this value to "false" disables Zookeeper Config

  • root sets the base namespace for configuration values

  • defaultContext sets the name used by all applications

  • profileSeparator sets the value of the separator used to separate the profile name in property sources with profiles

Spring Boot Cloud CLI

Spring Boot CLI provides Spring Boot command line features for Spring Cloud. You can write Groovy scripts to run Spring Cloud component applications (e.g. @EnableEurekaServer). You can also easily do things like encryption and decryption to support Spring Cloud Config clients with secret configuration values.

Installation

To install, make sure you have Spring Boot CLI (1.3.0 or better):

$ spring version
Spring CLI v1.3.2.RELEASE

E.g. for SDKMan users

$ sdk install springboot 1.3.2.RELEASE
$ sdk use springboot 1.3.2.RELEASE

and install the Spring Cloud plugin:

$ mvn install
$ spring install org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-cli:1.1.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT
Important
Prerequisites: to use the encryption and decryption features you need the full-strength JCE installed in your JVM (it’s not there by default). You can download the "Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files" from Oracle, and follow instructions for installation (essentially replace the 2 policy files in the JRE lib/security directory with the ones that you downloaded).

Writing Groovy Scripts and Running Applications

Spring Cloud CLI has support for most of the Spring Cloud declarative features, such as the @Enable* class of annotations. For example, here is a fully functional Eureka server

app.groovy
@EnableEurekaServer
class Eureka {}

which you can run from the command line like this

$ spring run app.groovy

To include additional dependencies, often it suffices just to add the appropriate feature-enabling annotation, e.g. @EnableConfigServer, @EnableOAuth2Sso or @EnableEurekaClient. To manually include a dependency you can use a @Grab with the special "Spring Boot" short style artifact co-ordinates, i.e. with just the artifact ID (no need for group or version information), e.g. to set up a client app to listen on AMQP for management events from the Spring CLoud Bus:

app.groovy
@Grab('spring-cloud-starter-bus-amqp')
@RestController
class Service {
  @RequestMapping('/')
  def home() { [message: 'Hello'] }
}

Encryption and Decryption

The Spring Cloud CLI comes with an "encrypt" and a "decrypt" command. Both accept arguments in the same form with a key specified as a mandatory "--key", e.g.

$ spring encrypt mysecret --key foo
682bc583f4641835fa2db009355293665d2647dade3375c0ee201de2a49f7bda
$ spring decrypt --key foo 682bc583f4641835fa2db009355293665d2647dade3375c0ee201de2a49f7bda
mysecret

To use a key in a file (e.g. an RSA public key for encyption) prepend the key value with "@" and provide the file path, e.g.

$ spring encrypt mysecret --key @${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
AQAjPgt3eFZQXwt8tsHAVv/QHiY5sI2dRcR+...

Spring Cloud Security

Spring Cloud Security offers a set of primitives for building secure applications and services with minimum fuss. A declarative model which can be heavily configured externally (or centrally) lends itself to the implementation of large systems of co-operating, remote components, usually with a central indentity management service. It is also extremely easy to use in a service platform like Cloud Foundry. Building on Spring Boot and Spring Security OAuth2 we can quickly create systems that implement common patterns like single sign on, token relay and token exchange.

Quickstart

OAuth2 Single Sign On

Here’s a Spring Cloud "Hello World" app with HTTP Basic authentication and a single user account:

app.groovy
@Grab('spring-boot-starter-security')
@Controller
class Application {

  @RequestMapping('/')
  String home() {
    'Hello World'
  }

}

You can run it with spring run app.groovy and watch the logs for the password (username is "user"). So far this is just the default for a Spring Boot app.

Here’s a Spring Cloud app with OAuth2 SSO:

app.groovy
@Controller
@EnableOAuth2Sso
class Application {

  @RequestMapping('/')
  String home() {
    'Hello World'
  }

}

Spot the difference? This app will actually behave exactly the same as the previous one, because it doesn’t know it’s OAuth2 credentals yet.

You can register an app in github quite easily, so try that if you want a production app on your own domain. If you are happy to test on localhost:8080, then set up these properties in your application configuration:

application.yml
spring:
  oauth2:
    client:
      clientId: bd1c0a783ccdd1c9b9e4
      clientSecret: 1a9030fbca47a5b2c28e92f19050bb77824b5ad1
      accessTokenUri: https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token
      userAuthorizationUri: https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize
      clientAuthenticationScheme: form
    resource:
      userInfoUri: https://api.github.com/user
      preferTokenInfo: false

run the app above and it will redirect to github for authorization. If you are already signed into github you won’t even notice that it has authenticated. These credentials will only work if your app is running on port 8080.

To limit the scope that the client asks for when it obtains an access token you can set spring.oauth2.client.scope (comma separated or an array in YAML). By default the scope is empty and it is up to to Authorization Server to decide what the defaults should be, usually depending on the settings in the client registration that it holds.

Note
The examples above are all Groovy scripts. If you want to write the same code in Java (or Groovy) you need to add Spring Security OAuth2 to the classpath (e.g. see the sample here).

OAuth2 Protected Resource

You want to protect an API resource with an OAuth2 token? Here’s a simple example (paired with the client above):

app.groovy
@Grab('spring-cloud-starter-security')
@RestController
@EnableResourceServer
class Application {

  @RequestMapping('/')
  def home() {
    [message: 'Hello World']
  }

}

and

application.yml
spring:
  oauth2:
    resource:
      userInfoUri: https://api.github.com/user
      preferTokenInfo: false

More Detail

Single Sign On

Note
All of the OAuth2 SSO and resource server features moved to Spring Boot in version 1.3. You can find documentation in the Spring Boot user guide.

Token Relay

A Token Relay is where an OAuth2 consumer acts as a Client and forwards the incoming token to outgoing resource requests. The consumer can be a pure Client (like an SSO application) or a Resource Server.

Client Token Relay

If your app has a Spring Cloud Zuul embedded reverse proxy (using @EnableZuulProxy) then you can ask it to forward OAuth2 access tokens downstream to the services it is proxying. Thus the SSO app above can be enhanced simply like this:

app.groovy
@Controller
@EnableOAuth2Sso
@EnableZuulProxy
class Application {

}

and it will (in addition to loggin the user in and grabbing a token) pass the authentication token downstream to the /proxy/* services. If those services are implemented with @EnableOAuth2Resource then they will get a valid token in the correct header.

How does it work? The @EnableOAuth2Sso annotation pulls in spring-cloud-starter-security (which you could do manually in a traditional app), and that in turn triggers some autoconfiguration for a ZuulFilter, which itself is activated because Zuul is on the classpath (via @EnableZuulProxy). The {github}/tree/master/src/main/java/org/springframework/cloud/security/oauth2/proxy/OAuth2TokenRelayFilter.java[filter] just extracts an access token from the currently authenticated user, and puts it in a request header for the downstream requests.

Resource Server Token Relay

If your app has @EnableOAuth2Resource and also is a Client (i.e. it has a spring.oauth2.client.clientId, even if it doesn’t use it), then the OAuth2RestOperations that is provided for @Autowired users by Spring Cloud (it is declared as @Primary) will also forward tokens. If you don’t want to forward tokens (and that is a valid choice, since you might want to act as yourself, rather than the client that sent you the token), then you only need to create your own OAuth2RestOperations instead of autowiring the default one. Here’s a basic example showing the use of the autowired rest template ("foo.com" is a Resource Server accepting the same tokens as the surrounding app):

MyController.java
@Autowired
private OAuth2RestOperations restTemplate;

@RequestMapping("/relay")
public String relay() {
    ResponseEntity<String> response =
      restTemplate.getForEntity("https://foo.com/bar", String.class);
    return "Success! (" + response.getBody() + ")";
}

Configuring Authentication Downstream of a Zuul Proxy

You can control the authorization behaviour downstream of an @EnableZuulProxy through the proxy.auth.* settings. Example:

application.yml
proxy:
  auth:
    routes:
      customers: oauth2
      stores: passthru
      recommendations: none

In this example the "customers" service gets an OAuth2 token relay, the "stores" service gets a passthrough (the authorization header is just passed downstream), and the "recommendations" service has its authorization header removed. The default behaviour is to do a token relay if there is a token available, and passthru otherwise.

See {github}/tree/master/src/main/java/org/springframework/cloud/security/oauth2/proxy/ProxyAuthenticationProperties[ ProxyAuthenticationProperties] for full details.

Spring Cloud for Cloud Foundry

Spring Cloud for Cloudfoundry makes it easy to run Spring Cloud apps in Cloud Foundry (the Platform as a Service). Cloud Foundry has the notion of a "service", which is middlware that you "bind" to an app, essentially providing it with an environment variable containing credentials (e.g. the location and username to use for the service).

The spring-cloud-cloudfoundry-web project provides basic support for some enhanced features of webapps in Cloud Foundry: binding automatically to single-sign-on services and optionally enabling sticky routing for discovery.

The spring-cloud-cloudfoundry-discovery project provides an implementation of Spring Cloud Commons DiscoveryClient so you can @EnableDiscoveryClient and provide your credentials as spring.cloud.cloudfoundry.discovery.[email,password] and then you can use the DiscoveryClient directly or via a LoadBalancerClient (also *.url if you are not connecting to [Pivotal Web Services](https://run.pivotal.io)).

The first time you use it the discovery client might be slow owing to the fact that it has to get an access token from Cloud Foundry.

Quickstart

Here’s a Spring Cloud app with Cloud Foundry discovery:

app.groovy
@Grab('org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-cloudfoundry')
@RestController
@EnableDiscoveryClient
class Application {

  @Autowired
  DiscoveryClient client

  @RequestMapping('/')
  String home() {
    'Hello from ' + client.getLocalServiceInstance()
  }

}

If you run it without any service bindings:

$ spring jar app.jar app.groovy
$ cf push -p app.jar

It will show its app name in the home page.

Single Sign On

Note
All of the OAuth2 SSO and resource server features moved to Spring Boot in version 1.3. You can find documentation in the Spring Boot user guide.

This project provides automatic binding from CloudFoundry service credentials to the Spring Boot features. If you have a CloudFoundry service called "sso", for instance, with credentials containing "client_id", "client_secret" and "auth_domain", it will bind automatically to the Spring OAuth2 client that you enable with @EnableOAuth2Sso (from Spring Boot). The name of the service can be parameterized using spring.oauth2.sso.serviceId.

Spring Cloud Cluster

Spring Cloud Cluster offers a set of primitives for building "cluster" features into a distributed system. Example are leadership election, consistent storage of cluster state, global locks and one-time tokens.

Leader Election

Leader election allows application to work together with other applications to coordinate a cluster leadership via a third party system. Currently we provide integrations with zookeeper, hazelcast and etcd.

From user perspective election is working via interfaces org.springframework.cloud.cluster.leader.Candidate and org.springframework.cloud.cluster.leader.Context. Candidate contains access to leadership’s role and id and also have methods onGranted and onRevoked. These callback methods are useful if default Candidate implementation is changed.

Leader election is auto-configured if spring-cloud-cluster-autoconfigure and either spring-cloud-cluster-hazelcast, spring-cloud-cluster-zookeeper or spring-cloud-cluster-etcd jars are found from a classpath. In case where both jars are found leader election is created using both systems. See sections Zookeeper, Hazelcast and Etcd for more information about a created beans.

Default Candidate created from auto-configuration is org.springframework.cloud.cluster.leader.DefaultCandidate which currently only logs granted and revoked events.

If there’s a need for disable all leader related auto-configuration, a spring.cloud.cluster.leader.enabled can be set to false which then allows to do manual configuration even if the jars an on a classpath. Properties spring.cloud.cluster.leader.id and spring.cloud.cluster.leader.role can be used to set default identifier and role.

If you are interested to simple get notification of granted and revoked events one option is to attach event listener into spring application context. Events OnGrantedEvent and OnRevokedEvent are sent as spring event objects.

Simply create your own event listener class:

class MyEventListener implements ApplicationListener<AbstractLeaderEvent> {

  @Override
  public void onApplicationEvent(AbstractLeaderEvent event) {
    // do something with OnGrantedEvent or OnRevokedEvent
  }
}

and then create it as a bean.

@Configuration
static class Config {
  @Bean
  public MyEventListener myEventListener() {
    return new MyEventListener();
  }
}

For simply log events you can also use a utility class LoggingListener which allows easy configuration.

import org.springframework.cloud.cluster.leader.event.LoggingListener;

@Configuration
static class Config {
  @Bean
  public LoggingListener loggingListener() {
    return new LoggingListener("info");
  }
}

Zookeeper

Candidate implementation for zookeeper is created with a bean name zookeeperLeaderCandidate which can be used to override the one created during auto-configuration.

Zookeeper based election can be explicitly disabled using property spring.cloud.cluster.zookeeper.leader.enabled.

Other propertys spring.cloud.cluster.zookeeper.namespace and spring.cloud.cluster.zookeeper.connect can be used to set the zookeeper base namespace path and connect string.

Hazelcast

Candidate implementation for zookeeper is created with a bean name hazelcastLeaderCandidate which can be used to override the one created during auto-configuration.

Hazelcast based election can be explicitly disabled using property spring.cloud.cluster.hazelcast.leader.enabled. If you want to provide xml based configuration for Hazelcast instance use property spring.cloud.cluster.hazelcast.config-location to tell location of a Hazelcast xml configuration file. config-location is a normal spring Resource.

Etcd

Candidate implementation for etcd is created with a bean name etcdLeaderCandidate which can be used to override the one created during auto-configuration.

Etcd based election can be explicitly disabled using property spring.cloud.cluster.etcd.leader.enabled.

Multiple etcd cluster uris can be specified using property spring.cloud.cluster.etcd.connect