undefined## Client Side Load Balancer: Ribbon {#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).

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 approximateZoneFromDomain 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
    }
}