Spring Eureka

#springboot #java #backend

1. 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 difficult to do and can be 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.

1.1. How to Include Eureka Client

To include the Eureka Client in your project, use the starter with a group ID of org.springframework.cloud and an artifact ID of spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client. See the Spring Cloud Project page for details on setting up your build system with the current Spring Cloud Release Train.

1.2. Registering with Eureka

When a client registers with Eureka, it provides meta-data about itself — such as host, port, health indicator URL, home page, and other details. 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.

The following example shows a minimal Eureka client application:

@SpringBootApplication
@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);
    }

}

Note that the preceding example shows a normal Spring Boot application. By having spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client on the classpath, your application automatically registers with the Eureka Server. Configuration is required to locate the Eureka server, as shown in the following example:

application.yml

eureka:
  client:
    serviceUrl:
      defaultZone: http://localhost:8761/eureka/

In the preceding example, defaultZone is a magic string fallback value that provides the service URL for any client that does not express a preference (in other words, it is a useful default).