Posts Tagged Spring Boot

Deploying Spring Boot Apps to AWS with Netflix Nebula and Spinnaker: Part 2 of 2

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Build Automation, Cloud, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Enterprise Software Development, Java Development, Software Development on May 12, 2018

Part One of this post examined enterprise deployment tools and introduced two of Netflix’s open-source deployment tools, the Nebula Gradle plugins, and Spinnaker. In Part Two, we will deploy a production-ready Spring Boot application, the Election microservice, to multiple Amazon EC2 instances, behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). We will use a fully automated DevOps workflow. The build, test, package, bake, deploy process will be handled by the Netflix Nebula Gradle Linux Packaging Plugin, Jenkins, and Spinnaker. The high-level process will involve the following steps:

Configure Gradle to build a production-ready fully executable application for Unix systems (executable JAR)
Using deb-s3 and GPG Suite, create a secure, signed APT (Debian) repository on Amazon S3
Using Jenkins and the Netflix Nebula plugin, build a Debian package, containing the executable JAR and configuration files
Using Jenkins and deb-s3, publish the package to the S3-based APT repository
Using Spinnaker (HashiCorp Packer under the covers), bake an Ubuntu Amazon Machine Image (AMI), replete with the executable JAR installed from the Debian package
Deploy an auto-scaling set of Amazon EC2 instances from the baked AMI, behind an ELB, running the Spring Boot application using both the Red/Black and Highlander deployment strategies
Be able to repeat the entire automated build, test, package, bake, deploy process, triggered by a new code push to GitHub

The overall build, test, package, bake, deploy process will look as follows.

DevOps Architecture

Spinnaker’s modern architecture is comprised of several independent microservices. The codebase is written in Java and Groovy, and leverages the Spring Boot framework¹. Spinnaker’s configuration, startup, updates, and rollbacks are centrally managed by Halyard. Halyard provides a single point of contact for command line interaction with Spinnaker’s microservices.

Spinnaker can be installed on most private or public infrastructure, either containerized or virtualized. Spinnaker has links to a number of Quickstart installations on their website. For this demonstration, I deployed and configured Spinnaker on Azure, starting with one of the Azure Spinnaker quick-start ARM templates. The template provisions all the necessary Azure resources. For better performance, I chose upgraded the default VM to a larger Standard D4 v3, which contains 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory. I would recommend at least 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory at a minimum for Spinnaker.

Another Azure VM, in the same virtual network as the Spinnaker VM, already hosts Jenkins, SonarQube, and Nexus Repository OSS.

From Spinnaker on Azure, Debian Packages are uploaded to the APT package repository on AWS S3. Spinnaker also bakes Amazon Machine Images (AMI) on AWS. Spinnaker provisions the AWS resources, including EC2 instances, Load Balancers, Auto Scaling Groups, Launch Configurations, and Security Groups. The only resources you need on AWS to get started with Spinnaker are a VPC and Subnets. There are some minor, yet critical prerequisites for naming your VPC and Subnets.

Other external tools include GitHub for source control and Slack for notifications. I have built and managed everything from a Mac, however, all tools are platform agnostic. The Spring Boot application was developed in JetBrains IntelliJ.

Source Code

All source code for this post can be found on GitHub. The project’s README file contains a list of the Election service’s endpoints.

Code samples in this post are displayed as Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

APT Repository

After setting up Spinnaker on Azure, I created an APT repository on Amazon S3, using the instructions provided by Netflix, in their Code Lab, An Introduction to Spinnaker: Hello Deployment. The setup involves creating an Amazon S3 bucket to serve as an APT (Debian) repository, creating a GPG key for signing, and using deb-s3 to manage the repository. The Code Lab also uses Aptly, a great tool, which I skipped for brevity.

GPG Key

On the Mac, I used GPG Suite to create a GPG (GNU Privacy Guard or GnuPG) automatic signing key for my APT repository. The key is required by Spinnaker to verify the Debian packages in the repository, before installation.

The Ruby Gem, deb-s3, makes management of the Debian packages easy and automatable with Jenkins. Jenkins uploads the Debian packages, using a deb-s3 command, such as the following (gist). In this post, Jenkins calls the command from the shell script, upload-deb-package.sh, which is included in the GitHub project.

The Jenkins user requires access to the signing key, to build and upload the Debian packages. I created my GPG key on my Mac, securely copied the key to my Ubuntu-based Jenkins VM, and then imported the key for the Jenkins user. You could also create your key on Ubuntu, directly. Make sure you backup your private key in a secure location!

Nebula Packaging Plugin

Next, I set up a Gradle task in my build.gradle file to build my Debian packages using the Netflix Nebula Gradle Linux Packaging Plugin. Although Debian packaging tasks could become complex for larger application installations, this task for this post is pretty simple. I used many of the best-practices suggested by Spring for Production-grade deployments. The best-practices guide recommends file location, file modes, and file user and group ownership. I create the JAR as a fully executable JAR, meaning it is started like any other executable and does not have to be started with the standard java -jar command.

In the task, shown below (gist), the JAR and the external configuration file (optional) are copied to specific locations during the deployment and symlinked, as required. I used the older SysVInit system (init.d) to enable the application to automatically starts on boot. You should probably use systemctl for your services with Ubuntu 16.04.

You can use the ar (archive) command (i.e., ar -x spring-postgresql-demo_4.5.0_all.deb), to extract and inspect the structure of a Debian package. The data.tar.gz file, displayed below in Atom, shows the final package structure.

Base AMI

Next, I baked a base AMI for Spinnaker to use. This base AMI is used by Spinnaker to bake (re-bake) the final AMI(s) used for provisioning the EC2 instances, containing the Spring Boot Application. The Spinnaker base AMI is built from another base AMI, the official Ubuntu 16.04 LTS image. I installed the OpenJDK 8 package on the AMI, which is required to run the Java-based Election service. Lastly and critically, I added information about the location of my S3-based APT Debian package repository to the list of configured APT data sources, and the GPG key required for package verification. This information and key will be used later by Spinnaker to bake AMIʼs, using this base AMI. The set-up script, base_ubuntu_ami_setup.sh, which is included in the GitHub project.

Jenkins

This post uses a single Jenkins CI/CD pipeline. Using a Webhook, the pipeline is automatically triggered by every git push to the GitHub project. The pipeline pulls the source code, builds the application, and performs unit-tests and static code analysis with SonarQube. If the build succeeds and the tests pass, the build artifact (JAR file) is bundled into a Debian package using the Nebula Packaging plugin, uploaded to the S3 APT repository using s3-deb, and archived locally for Spinnaker to reference. Once the pipeline is completed, on success or on failure, a Slack notification is sent. The Jenkinsfile, used for this post is available in the project on Github.

Below is a traditional Jenkins view of the CI/CD pipeline, with links to unit test reports, SonarQube results, build artifacts, and GitHub source code.

Below is the same pipeline viewed using the Jenkins Blue Ocean plugin.

It is important to perform sufficient testing before building the Debian package. You donʼt want to bake an AMI and deploy EC2 instances, at a cost, before finding out the application has bugs.

Spinnaker Setup

First, I set up a new Spinnaker Slack channel and a custom bot user. Spinnaker details the Slack set up in their Notifications and Events Guide. You can configure what type of Spinnaker events trigger Slack notifications.

AWS Spinnaker User

Next, I added the required Spinnaker User, Policy, and Roles to AWS. Spinnaker uses this access to query and provision infrastructure on your behalf. The Spinnaker User requires Power User level access to perform all their necessary tasks. AWS IAM set up is detailed by Spinnaker in their Cloud Providers Setup for AWS. They also describe the setup of other cloud providers. You need to be reasonably familiar with AWS IAM, including the PassRole permission to set up this part. As part of the setup, you enable AWS for Spinnaker and add your AWS account using the Halyard interface.

spin45

Spinnaker Security Groups

Next, I set up two Spinnaker Security Groups, corresponding to two AWS Security Groups, one for the load balancer and one for the Election service. The load balancer security group exposes port 80, and the Election service security group exposes port 8080.

Spinnaker Load Balancer

Next, I created a Spinnaker Load Balancer, corresponding to an Amazon Classic Load Balancer. The Load Balancer will load-balance the Election service EC2 instances. Below you see a Load Balancer, balancing a pair of active EC2 instances, the result of a Red/Black deployment.

Spinnaker can currently create both AWS Classic Load Balancers as well as Application Load Balancers (ALB).

spin25

Spinnaker Pipeline

This post uses a single, basic Spinnaker Pipeline. The pipeline bakes a new AMI from the Debian package generated by the Jenkins pipeline. After a manual approval stage, Spinnaker deploys a set of EC2 instances, behind the Load Balancer, which contains the latest version of the Election service. Spinnaker finishes the pipeline by sending a Slack notification.

Jenkins Integration

The pipeline is triggered by the successful completion of the Jenkins pipeline. This is set in the Configuration stage of the pipeline. The integration with Jenkins is managed through Spinnaker’s Igor service.

Bake Stage

Next, in the Bake stage, Spinnaker bakes a new AMI, containing the Debian package generated by the Jenkins pipeline. The stageʼs configuration contains the package name to reference.

The stageʼs configuration also includes a reference to which Base AMI to use, to bake the new AMIs. Here I have used the AMI ID of the base Spinnaker AMI, I created previously.

Deploy Stage

Next, the Deploy stage deploys the Election service, running on EC2 instances, provisioned from the new AMI, which was baked in the last stage. To configure the Deploy stage, you define a Spinnaker Server Group. According to Spinnaker, the Server Group identifies the deployable artifact, VM image type, the number of instances, autoscaling policies, metadata, Load Balancer, and a Security Group.

The Server Group also defines the Deployment Strategy. Below, I chose the Red/Black Deployment Strategy (also referred to as Blue/Green). This strategy will disable, not terminate the active Server Group. If the new deployment fails, we can manually or automatically perform a Rollback to the previous, currently disabled Server Group.

Letʼs Start Baking!

With set up complete, letʼs kick off a git push, trigger and complete the Jenkins pipeline, and finally trigger the Spinnaker pipeline. Below we see the pipelineʼs Bake stage has been started. Spinnakerʼs UI lets us view the Bakery Details. The Bakery, provided by Spinnakerʼs Rosco service, bakes the AMIs. Rosco uses HashiCorp Packer to bake the AMIs, using standard Packer templates.

Below we see Spinnaker (Rosco/Packer) locating the Base Spinnaker AMI we configured in the Pipelineʼs Bake stage. Next, we see Spinnaker sshʼing into a new EC2 instance with a temporary keypair and Security Group and starting the Election service Debian package installation.

Continuing, we see the latest Debian package, derived from the Jenkins pipelineʼs archive, being pulled from the S3-based APT repo. The package is verified using the GPG key and then installed. Lastly, we see a new AMI is created, containing the deployed Election service, which was initially built and packaged by Jenkins. Note the AWS Resource Tags created by Spinnaker, as shown in the Bakery output.

The base Spinnaker AMI and the AMIs baked by Spinnaker are visible in the AWS Console. Note the naming conventions used by Spinnaker for the AMIs, the Source AMI used to build the new APIs, and the addition of the Tags, which we saw being applied in the Bakery output above. The use of Tags indirectly allows full traceability from the deployed EC2 instance all the way back to the original code commit to git by the Developer.

Red/Black Deployments

With the new AMI baked successfully, and a required manual approval, using a Manual Judgement type pipeline stage, we can now begin a Red/Black deployment to AWS.

Using the Server Group configuration in the Deploy stage, Spinnaker deploys two EC2 instances, behind the ELB.

Below, we see the successful results of the Red/Black deployment. The single Spinnaker Cluster contains two deployed Server Groups. One group, the previously active Server Group (RED), comprised of two EC2 instances, is disabled. The ‘RED’ EC2 instances are unregistered with the load balancer but still running. The new Server Group (BLACK), also comprised of two EC2 instances, is now active and registered with the Load Balancer. Spinnaker will spread EC2 instances evenly across all Availability Zones in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

From the AWS Console, we can observe four running instances, though only two are registered with the load-balancer.

Here we see each deployed Server Group has a different Auto Scaling Group and Launch Configuration. Note the continued use of naming conventions by Spinnaker.

There can be only one, Highlander!

Now, in the Deploy stage of the pipeline, we will switch the Server Groupʼs Strategy to Highlander. The Highlander strategy will, as you probably guessed by the name, destroy all other Server Groups in the Cluster. This is more typically used for lower environments, like Development or Test, where you are only interested in the next version of the application for testing. The Red/Black strategy is more applicable to Production, where you want the opportunity to quickly rollback to the previous deployment, if necessary.

Following a successful deployment, below, we now see the first two Server Groups have been terminated, and a third Server Group in the Cluster is active.

In the AWS Console, we can confirm the four previous EC2 instances have been successfully terminated as a result of the Highlander deployment strategy, and two new instances are running.

As well, the previous Auto Scaling Groups and Launch Configurations have been deleted from AWS by Spinnaker.

As expected, the Classic Load Balancer only contains the two most recent EC2 instances from the last Server Group deployed.

Confirming the Deployment

Using the DNS address of the load balancer, we can hit the Election service endpoints, on either of the EC2 instances. All API endpoints are listed in the Projectʼs README file. Below, from a web browser, we see the candidates resource returning candidate information, retrieved from the Electionʼs PostgreSQL RDS database Test instance.

Similarly, from Postman, we can hit the load balancer and get back election information from the elections resource, using an HTTP GET.

I intentionally left out a discussion of the service’s RDS database and how configuration management was handled with Spring Profiles and Spring Cloud Config. Both topics were out of scope for this post.

Conclusion

Although this was a brief, whirlwind overview of deployment tools, it shows the power of delivery tools like Spinnaker, when seamlessly combined with other tools, like Jenkins and the Nebula plugins. Together, these tools are capable of efficiently, repeatably, and securely deploying large numbers of containerized and non-containerized applications to a variety of private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.

¹ Running Spinnaker on Compute Engine

AWS, CD, CI, Continuous Delivery, continuous deployment, Debian, GitOps, hashicorp, Jenkins, Packer, Spinnaker, Spring, Spring Boot

1 Comment

Deploying Spring Boot Apps to AWS with Netflix Nebula and Spinnaker: Part 1 of 2

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Build Automation, Continuous Delivery, Enterprise Software Development, Java Development, Software Development on May 10, 2018

Listening to DevOps industry pundits, you might be convinced everyone is running containers in Production (or by now, serverless). Although containerization is growing at a phenomenal rate, several recent surveys¹ indicate less than 50% of enterprises are deploying containers in Production. Filter those results further with the fact, of those enterprises, only a small percentage of their total application portfolios are containerized, let alone in Production.

As a DevOps Consultant, I regularly work with corporations whose global portfolios are in the thousands of applications. Indeed, some percentage of their applications are containerized, with less running in Production. However, a majority of those applications, even those built on modern, light-weight, distributed architectures, are still being deployed to bare-metal and virtualized public cloud and private data center infrastructure, for a variety of reasons.

Enterprise Deployment

Due to the scale and complexity of application portfolios, many organizations have invested in enterprise deployment tools, either commercially available or developed in-house. The enterprise deployment tool’s primary objective is to standardize the process of securely, reliably, and repeatably packaging, publishing, and deploying both containerized and non-containerized applications to large fleets of virtual machines and bare-metal servers, across multiple, geographically dispersed data centers and cloud providers. Enterprise deployment tools are particularly common in tightly regulated and compliance-driven organizations, as well as organizations that have undertaken large amounts of M&A, resulting in vastly different application technology stacks.

Better-known examples of commercially available enterprise deployment tools include IBM UrbanCode Deploy (aka uDeploy), XebiaLabs XL Deploy, CA Automic Release Automation, Octopus Deploy, and Electric Cloud ElectricFlow. While commercial tools continue to gain market share³, many organizations are tightly coupled to their in-house solutions through years of use and fear of widespread process disruption, given current economic, security, compliance, and skills-gap sensitivities.

Deployment Tool Anatomy

Most Enterprise deployment tools are compatible with standard binary package types, including Debian (.deb) and Red Hat (RPM) Package Manager (.rpm) packages for Linux, NuGet (.nupkg) packages for Windows, and Node Package Manager (.npm) and Bower for JavaScript. There are equivalent package types for other popular languages and formats, such as Go, Python, Ruby, SQL, Android, Objective-C, Swift, and Docker. Packages usually contain application metadata, a signature to ensure the integrity and/or authenticity², and a compressed payload.

Enterprise deployment tools are normally integrated with open-source packaging and publishing tools, such as Apache Maven, Apache Ivy/Ant, Gradle, NPM, NuGet, Bundler, PIP, and Docker.

Binary packages (and images), built with enterprise deployment tools, are typically stored in private, open-source or commercial binary (artifact) repositories, such as Spacewalk, JFrog Artifactory, and Sonatype Nexus Repository. The latter two, Artifactory and Nexus, support a multitude of modern package types and repository structures, including Maven, NuGet, PyPI, NPM, Bower, Ruby Gems, CocoaPods, Puppet, Chef, and Docker.

Mature binary repositories provide many features in addition to package management, including role-based access control, vulnerability scanning, rich APIs, DevOps integration, and fault-tolerant, high-availability architectures.

Lastly, enterprise deployment tools generally rely on standard package management systems to retrieve and install cryptographically verifiable packages and images. These include YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified), APT (aptitude), APK (Alpine Linux), NuGet, Chocolatey, NPM, PIP, Bundler, and Docker. Packages are deployed directly to running infrastructure, or indirectly to intermediate deployable components as Amazon Machine Images (AMI), Google Compute Engine machine images, VMware machines, Docker Images, or CoreOS rkt.

Open-Source Alternative

One such enterprise with an extensive portfolio of both containerized and non-containerized applications is Netflix. To standardize their deployments to multiple types of cloud infrastructure, Netflix has developed several well-known open-source software (OSS) tools, including the Nebula Gradle plugins and Spinnaker. I discussed Spinnaker in my previous post, Managing Applications Across Multiple Kubernetes Environments with Istio, as an alternative to Jenkins for deploying container workloads to Kubernetes on Google (GKE).

As a leader in OSS, Netflix has documented their deployment process in several articles and presentations, including a post from 2016, ‘How We Build Code at Netflix.’ According to the article, the high-level process for deployment to Amazon EC2 instances involves the following steps:

Code is built and tested locally using Nebula
Changes are committed to a central git repository
Jenkins job executes Nebula, which builds, tests, and packages the application for deployment
Builds are “baked” into Amazon Machine Images (using Spinnaker)
Spinnaker pipelines are used to deploy and promote the code change

The Nebula plugins and Spinnaker leverage many underlying, open-source technologies, including Pivotal Spring, Java, Groovy, Gradle, Maven, Apache Commons, Redline RPM, HashiCorp Packer, Redis, HashiCorp Consul, Cassandra, and Apache Thrift.

Both the Nebula plugins and Spinnaker have been battle tested in Production by Netflix, as well as by many other industry leaders after Netflix open-sourced the tools in 2014 (Nebula) and 2015 (Spinnaker). Currently, there are approximately 20 Nebula Gradle plugins available on GitHub. Notable core-contributors in the development of Spinnaker include Google, Microsoft, Pivotal, Target, Veritas, and Oracle, to name a few. A sign of its success, Spinnaker currently has over 4,600 Stars on GitHub!

Part Two: Demonstration

In Part Two, we will deploy a production-ready Spring Boot application, the Election microservice, to multiple Amazon EC2 instances, behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). We will use a fully automated DevOps workflow. The build, test, package, bake, deploy process will be handled by the Netflix Nebula Gradle Linux Packaging Plugin, Jenkins, and Spinnaker. The high-level process will involve the following steps:

Configure Gradle to build a production-ready fully executable application for Unix systems (executable JAR)
Using deb-s3 and GPG Suite, create a secure, signed APT (Debian) repository on Amazon S3
Using Jenkins and the Netflix Nebula plugin, build a Debian package, containing the executable JAR and configuration files
Using Jenkins and deb-s3, publish the package to the S3-based APT repository
Using Spinnaker (HashiCorp Packer under the covers), bake an Ubuntu Amazon Machine Image (AMI), replete with the executable JAR installed from the Debian package
Deploy an auto-scaling set of Amazon EC2 instances from the baked AMI, behind an ELB, running the Spring Boot application using both the Red/Black and Highlander deployment strategies
Be able to repeat the entire automated build, test, package, bake, deploy process, triggered by a new code push to GitHub

The overall build, test, package, bake, deploy process will look as follows.

References

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.

¹ Recent Surveys: Forrester, Portworx, Cloud Foundry Survey
² Courtesy Wikipedia – rpm
³ XebiaLabs Kicks Off 2017 with Triple-Digit Growth in Enterprise DevOps

AWS, CD, CI, Continuous Delivery, continuous deployment, Debian, GitOps, hashicorp, Jenkins, Packer, Spinnaker, Spring, Spring Boot

1 Comment

Developing Cloud-Native Data-Centric Spring Boot Applications for Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Cloud, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Java Development, PCF, Software Development on March 23, 2018

In this post, we will explore the development of a cloud-native, data-centric Spring Boot 2.0 application, and its deployment to Pivotal Software’s hosted Pivotal Cloud Foundry service, Pivotal Web Services. We will add a few additional features, such as Spring Data, Lombok, and Swagger, to enhance our application.

According to Pivotal, Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based Applications. Spring Boot takes an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries. Spring Boot 2.0 just went GA on March 1, 2018. This is the first major revision of Spring Boot since 1.0 was released almost 4 years ago. It is also the first GA version of Spring Boot that provides support for Spring Framework 5.0.

Pivotal Web Services’ tagline is ‘The Agile Platform for the Agile Team Powered by Cloud Foundry’. According to Pivotal, Pivotal Web Services (PWS) is a hosted environment of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF). PWS is hosted on AWS in the US-East region. PWS utilizes two availability zones for redundancy. PWS provides developers a Spring-centric PaaS alternative to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and OpsWorks. With PWS, you get the reliability and security of AWS, combined with the rich-functionality and ease-of-use of PCF.

To demonstrate the feature-rich capabilities of the Spring ecosystem, the Spring Boot application shown in this post incorporates the following complimentary technologies:

Spring Boot Actuator: Sub-project of Spring Boot, adds several production grade services to Spring Boot applications with little developer effort
Spring Data JPA: Sub-project of Spring Data, easily implement JPA based repositories and data access layers
Spring Data REST: Sub-project of Spring Data, easily build hypermedia-driven REST web services on top of Spring Data repositories
Spring HATEOAS: Create REST representations that follow the HATEOAS principle from Spring-based applications
Springfox Swagger 2: We are using the Springfox implementation of the Swagger 2 specification, an automated JSON API documentation for API’s built with Spring
Lombok: The @Data annotation generates boilerplate code that is typically associated with simple POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) and beans: @ToString, @EqualsAndHashCode, @Getter, @Setter, and @RequiredArgsConstructor

Source Code

All source code for this post can be found on GitHub. To get started quickly, use one of the two following commands (gist).

For this post, I have used JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA and Git Bash on Windows for development. However, all code should be compatible with most popular IDEs and development platforms. The project assumes you have Docker and the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI) installed locally.

Code samples in this post are displayed as Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Links to gists are also provided.

Demo Application

The Spring Boot application demonstrated in this post is a simple election-themed RESTful API. The app allows API consumers to create, read, update, and delete, candidates, elections, and votes, via its exposed RESTful HTTP-based resources.

The Spring Boot application consists of (7) JPA Entities that mirror the tables and views in the database, (7) corresponding Spring Data Repositories, (2) Spring REST Controller, (4) Liquibase change sets, and associated Spring, Liquibase, Swagger, and PCF configuration files. I have intentionally chosen to avoid the complexities of using Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) for brevity, albeit a security concern, and directly expose the entities as resources.

Controller Resources

This application is a simple CRUD application. The application contains a few simple HTTP GET resources in each of the two controller classes, as an introduction to Spring REST controllers. For example, the CandidateController contains the /candidates/summary and /candidates/summary/{election} resources (shown below in Postman). Typically, you would expose your data to the end-user as controller resources, as opposed to exposing the entities directly. The ease of defining controller resources is one of the many powers of Spring Boot.

Paging and Sorting

As an introduction to Spring Data’s paging and sorting features, both the VoteRepository and VotesElectionsViewRepository Repository Interfaces extend Spring Data’s PagingAndSortingRepository<T,ID> interface, instead of the default CrudRepository<T,ID> interface. With paging and sorting enabled, you may both sort and limit the amount of data returned in the response payload. For example, to reduce the size of your response payload, you might choose to page through the votes in blocks of 25 votes at a time. In that case, as shown below in Postman, if you needed to return just votes 26-50, you would append the /votes resource with ?page=1&size=25. Since paging starts at page 0 (zero), votes 26-50 will on page 1.

Swagger

This project also includes the Springfox implementation of the Swagger 2 specification. Along with the Swagger 2 dependency, the project takes a dependency on io.springfox:springfox-swagger-ui. The Springfox Swagger UI dependency allows us to view and interactively test our controller resources through Swagger’s browser-based UI, as shown below.

All Swagger configuration can be found in the project’s SwaggerConfig Spring Configuration class.

Gradle

This post’s Spring Boot application is built with Gradle, although it could easily be converted to Maven if desired. According to Gradle, Gradle is the modern tool used to build, automate and deliver everything from mobile apps to microservices.

Data

In real-life, most applications interact with one or more data sources. The Spring Boot application demonstrated in this post interacts with data from a PostgreSQL database. PostgreSQL, or simply Postgres, is the powerful, open-source object-relational database system, which has supported production-grade applications for 15 years. The application’s single elections database consists of (6) tables, (3) views, and (2) function, which are both used to generate random votes for this demonstration.

Spring Data makes interacting with PostgreSQL easy. In addition to the features of Spring Data, we will use Liquibase. Liquibase is known as the source control for your database. With Liquibase, your database development lifecycle can mirror your Spring development lifecycle. Both DDL (Data Definition Language) and DML (Data Manipulation Language) changes are versioned controlled, alongside the Spring Boot application source code.

Locally, we will take advantage of Docker to host our development PostgreSQL database, using the official PostgreSQL Docker image. With Docker, there is no messy database installation and configuration of your local development environment. Recreating and deleting your PostgreSQL database is simple.

To support the data-tier in our hosted PWS environment, we will implement ElephantSQL, an offering from the Pivotal Services Marketplace. ElephantSQL is a hosted version of PostgreSQL, running on AWS. ElephantSQL is referred to as PostgreSQL as a Service, or more generally, a Database as a Service or DBaaS. As a Pivotal Marketplace service, we will get easy integration with our PWS-hosted Spring Boot application, with near-zero configuration.

Docker

First, set up your local PostgreSQL database using Docker and the official PostgreSQL Docker image. Since this is only a local database instance, we will not worry about securing our database credentials (gist).

Your running PostgreSQL container should resemble the output shown below.

Data Source

Most IDEs allow you to create and save data sources. Although this is not a requirement, it makes it easier to view the database’s resources and table data. Below, I have created a data source in IntelliJ from the running PostgreSQL container instance. The port, username, password, and database name were all taken from the above Docker command.

Liquibase

There are multiple strategies when it comes to managing changes to your database. With Liquibase, each set of changes are handled as change sets. Liquibase describes a change set as an atomic change that you want to apply to your database. Liquibase offers multiple formats for change set files, including XML, JSON, YAML, and SQL. For this post, I have chosen SQL, specifically PostgreSQL SQL dialect, which can be designated in the IntelliJ IDE. Below is an example of the first changeset, which creates four tables and two indexes.

As shown below, change sets are stored in the db/changelog/changes sub-directory, as configured in the master change log file (db.changelog-master.yaml). Change set files follow an incremental naming convention.

The empty PostgreSQL database, before any Liquibase changes, should resemble the screengrab shown below.

To automatically run Liquibase database migrations on startup, the org.liquibase:liquibase-core dependency must be added to the project’s build.gradle file. To apply the change sets to your local, empty PostgreSQL database, simply start the service locally with the gradle bootRun command. As the app starts after being compiled, any new Liquibase change sets will be applied.

You might ask how does Liquibase know the change sets are new. During the initial startup of the Spring Boot application, in addition to any initial change sets, Liquibase creates two database tables to track changes, the databasechangelog and databasechangeloglock tables. Shown below are the two tables, along with the results of the four change sets included in the project, and applied by Liquibase to the local PostgreSQL elections database.

Below we see the contents of the databasechangelog table, indicating that all four change sets were successfully applied to the database. Liquibase checks this table before applying change sets.

ElephantSQL

Before we can deploy our Spring Boot application to PWS, we need an accessible PostgreSQL instance in the Cloud; I have chosen ElephantSQL. Available through the Pivotal Services Marketplace, ElephantSQL currently offers one free and three paid service plans for their PostgreSQL as a Service. I purchased the Panda service plan as opposed to the free Turtle service plan. I found the free service plan was too limited in the maximum number of database connections for multiple service instances.

Previewing and purchasing an ElephantSQL service plan from the Pivotal Services Marketplace, assuming you have an existing PWS account, literally takes a single command (gist).

The output of the command should resemble the screengrab below. Note the total concurrent connections and total storage for each plan.

To get details about the running ElephantSQL service, use the cf service elections command.

From the ElephantSQL Console, we can obtain the connection information required to access our PostgreSQL elections database. You will need the default database name, username, password, and URL.

Service Binding

Once you have created the PostgreSQL database service, you need to bind the database service to the application. We will bind our application and the database, using the PCF deployment manifest file (manifest.yml), found in the project’s root directory. Binding is done using the services section (shown below).

The key/value pairs in the env section of the deployment manifest will become environment variables, local to the deployed Spring Boot service. These key/value pairs in the manifest will also override any configuration set in Spring’s external application properties file (application.yml). This file is located in the resources sub-directory. Note the SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE: test environment variable in the manifest.yml file. This variable designates which Spring Profile will be active from the multiple profiles defined in the application.yml file.

Deployment to PWS

Next, we run gradle build followed by cf push to deploy one instance of the Spring Boot service to PWS and associate it with our ElephantSQL database instance. Below is the expected output from the cf push command.

Note the route highlighted below. This is the URL where your Spring Boot service will be available.

To confirm your ElephantSQL database was populated by Liquibase when PWS started the deployed Spring application instance, we can check the ElephantSQL Console’s Stats tab. Note the database tables and rows in each table, signifying Liquibase ran successfully. Alternately, you could create another data source in your IDE, connected to ElephantSQL; this can be helpful for troubleshooting.

To access the running service and check that data is being returned, point your browser (or Postman) to the URL returned from the cf push command output (see second screengrab above) and hit the /candidates resource. Obviously, your URL, referred to as a route by PWS, will be different and unique. In the response payload, you should observe a JSON array of eight candidate objects. Each candidate was inserted into the Candidate table of the database, by Liquibase, when Liquibase executed the second of the four change sets on start-up.

With Spring Boot Actuator and Spring Data REST, our simple Spring Boot application has dozens of resources exposed automatically, without extensive coding of resource controllers. Actuator exposes resources to help manage and troubleshoot the application, such as info, health, mappings (shown below), metrics, env, and configprops, among others. All Actuator resources are exposed explicitly, thus they can be disabled for Production deployments. With Spring Boot 2.0, all Actuator resources are now preceded with /actuator/ .

According to Pivotal, Spring Data REST builds on top of Spring Data repositories, analyzes an application’s domain model and exposes hypermedia-driven HTTP resources for aggregates contained in the model, such as our /candidates resource. A partial list of the application’s exposed resources are listed in the GitHub project’s README file.

In Spring’s approach to building RESTful web services, HTTP requests are handled by a controller. Spring Data REST automatically exposes CRUD resources for our entities. With Spring Data JPA, POJOs like our Candidate class are annotated with @Entity, indicating that it is a JPA entity. Lacking a @Table annotation, it is assumed that this entity will be mapped to a table named Candidate.

With Spring’s Data REST’s RESTful HTTP-based API, traditional database Create, Read, Update, and Delete commands for each PostgreSQL database table are automatically mapped to equivalent HTTP methods, including POST, GET, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE.

Below is an example, using Postman, to create a new Candidate using an HTTP POST method.

Below is an example, using Postman, to update a new Candidate using an HTTP PUT method.

With Spring Data REST, we can even retrieve data from read-only database Views, as shown below. This particular JSON response payload was returned from the candidates_by_elections database View, using the /election-candidates resource.

Scaling Up

Once your application is deployed and you have tested its functionality, you can easily scale out or scale in the number instances, memory, and disk, with the cf scale command (gist).

Below is sample output from scaling up the Spring Boot application to two instances.

Optionally, you can activate auto-scaling, which will allow the application to scale based on load.

Following the PCF architectural model, auto-scaling is actually another service from the Pivotal Services Marketplace, PCF App Autoscaler, as seen below, running alongside our ElephantSQL service.

With PCF App Autoscaler, you set auto-scaling minimum and maximum instance limits and define scaling rules. Below, I have configured auto-scaling to scale out the number of application instances when the average CPU Utilization of all instances hits 80%. Conversely, the application will scale in when the average CPU Utilization recedes below 40%. In addition to CPU Utilization, PCF App Autoscaler also allows you to set scaling rules based on HTTP Throughput, HTTP Latency, RabbitMQ Depth (queue depth), and Memory Utilization.

Furthermore, I set the auto-scaling minimum number of instances to two and the maximum number of instances to four. No matter how much load is placed on the application, PWS will not scale above four instances. Conversely, PWS will maintain a minimum of two running instances at all times.

Conclusion

This brief post demonstrates both the power and simplicity of Spring Boot to quickly develop highly-functional, data-centric RESTful API applications with minimal coding. Further, when coupled with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Spring developers have a highly scalable, resilient cloud-native application hosting platform.

Cloud, Cloud Native, ElephantSQL, microservice, PCF, Pivotal, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Postgres, PostgreSQL, PWS, RESTful, Spring, Spring Boot

Eventual Consistency: Decoupling Microservices with Spring AMQP and RabbitMQ

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in DevOps, Java Development, Software Development on May 15, 2017

Introduction

In a recent post, Decoupling Microservices using Message-based RPC IPC, with Spring, RabbitMQ, and AMPQ, we moved away from synchronous REST HTTP for inter-process communications (IPC) toward message-based IPC. Moving to asynchronous message-based communications allows us to decouple services from one another. It makes it easier to build, test, and release our individual services. In that post, we did not achieve fully asynchronous communications. Although, we did achieve a higher level of service decoupling using message-based Remote Procedure Call (RPC) IPC.

In this post, we will fully decouple our services using the distributed computing model of eventual consistency. More specifically, we will use a message-based, event-driven, loosely-coupled, eventually consistent architectural approach for communications between services.

What is eventual consistency? One of the best definitions of eventual consistency I have read was posted on microservices.io. To paraphrase, ‘using an event-driven, eventually consistent approach, each service publishes an event whenever it updates its data. Other services subscribe to events. When an event is received, a service updates its data.’

Example of Eventual Consistency

Imagine, Service A, the Customer service, inserts a new customer record into its database. Based on that ‘customer created’ event, Service A publishes a message containing the new customer object, serialized to JSON, to the lightweight, persistent, New Customer message queue.

Service B, the Customer Onboarding service, a subscriber to New Customer queue, consumes and deserializes Service A’s message. Service B may or may not perform a data transformation of the Customer object to its own Customer data model. Service B then inserts the new customer record into its own database.

In the above example, it can be said that the customer records in Service B’s database are eventually consistent with the customer records in Service A’s database. Service A makes a change and publishes a message in response to the event. Service B consumes the message and makes the same change. Eventually (likely within milliseconds), Service B’s customer records are consistent with Service A’s customer records.

Why Eventual Consistency?

So what does this apparent added complexity and duplication of data buy us? Consider the advantages. Service B, the Onboarding service, requires no knowledge of, or a dependency on, Service A, the Customer service. Still, Service B has a current record of all the customers that Service A maintains. Instead of making repeated and potentially costly RESTful HTTP calls or RPC message-based calls to or from Service A to Service B for new customers, Service B queries its database for a list of customers.

The value of eventual consistency increases factorially as you scale a distributed system. Imagine dozens of distinct microservices, many requiring data from other microservices. Further, imagine multiple instances of each of those services all running in parallel. Decoupling services from one another, through asynchronous forms of IPC, messaging, and event-driven eventual consistency greatly simplifies the software development lifecycle and operations.

Demonstration

In this post, we could use a few different architectural patterns to demonstrate message passing with RabbitMQ and Spring AMQP. They including Work Queues, Publish/Subscribe, Routing, or Topics. To keep things as simple as possible, we will have a single Producer, publish messages to a single durable and persistent message queue. We will have a single Subscriber, a Consumer, consume the messages from that queue. We focus on a single type of event message.

Sample Code

To demonstrate Spring AMQP-based messaging with RabbitMQ, we will use a reference set of three Spring Boot microservices. The Election Service, Candidate Service, and Voter Service are all backed by MongoDB. The services and MongoDB, along with RabbitMQ and Voter API Gateway, are all part of the Voter API.

The Voter API Gateway, based on HAProxy, serves as a common entry point to all three services, as well as serving as a reverse proxy and load balancer. The API Gateway provides round-robin load-balanced access to multiple instances of each service.

All the source code found this post’s example is available on GitHub, within a few different project repositories. The Voter Service repository contains the Voter service source code, along with the scripts and Docker Compose files required to deploy the project. The Election Service repository, Candidate Service repository, and Voter API Gateway repository are also available on GitHub. There is also a new AngularJS/Node.js Web Client, to demonstrate how to use the Voter API.

For this post, you only need to clone the Voter Service repository.

Deploying Voter API

All components, including the Spring Boot services, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, API Gateway, and the Web Client, are individually deployed using Docker. Each component is publicly available as a Docker Image, on Docker Hub. The Voter Service repository contains scripts to deploy the entire set of Dockerized components, locally. The repository also contains optional scripts to provision a Docker Swarm, using Docker’s newer swarm mode, and deploy the components. We will only deploy the services locally for this post.

To clone and deploy the components locally, including the Spring Boot services, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and the API Gateway, execute the following commands. If this is your first time running the commands, it may take a few minutes for your system to download all the required Docker Images from Docker Hub.

If everything was deployed successfully, you should observe six running Docker containers, similar to the output, below.

Using Voter API

The Voter Service, Election Service, and Candidate Service GitHub repositories each contain README files, which detail all the API endpoints each service exposes, and how to call them.

In addition to casting votes for candidates, the Voter service can simulate election results. Calling the /simulation endpoint, and indicating the desired election, the Voter service will randomly generate a number of votes for each candidate in that election. This will save us the burden of casting votes for this demonstration. However, the Voter service has no knowledge of elections or candidates. The Voter service depends on the Candidate service to obtain a list of candidates.

The Candidate service manages electoral candidates, their political affiliation, and the election in which they are running. Like the Voter service, the Candidate service also has a /simulation endpoint. The service will create a list of candidates based on the 2012 and 2016 US Presidential Elections. The simulation capability of the service saves us the burden of inputting candidates for this demonstration.

The Election service manages elections, their polling dates, and the type of election (federal, state, or local). Like the other services, the Election service also has a /simulation endpoint, which will create a list of sample elections. The Election service will not be discussed in this post’s demonstration. We will examine communications between the Candidate and Voter services, only.

REST HTTP Endpoint

As you recall from our previous post, Decoupling Microservices using Message-based RPC IPC, with Spring, RabbitMQ, and AMPQ, the Voter service exposes multiple, almost identical endpoints. Each endpoint uses a different means of IPC to retrieve candidates and generates random votes.

Calling the /voter/simulation/http/{election} endpoint and providing a specific election, prompts the Voter service to request a list of candidates from the Candidate service, based on the election parameter you input. This request is done using synchronous REST HTTP. The Voter service uses the HTTP GET method to request the data from the Candidate service. The Voter service then waits for a response.

The Candidate service receives the HTTP request. The Candidate service responds to the Voter service with a list of candidates in JSON format. The Voter service receives the response payload containing the list of candidates. The Voter service then proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate in the list. Finally, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

Message-based RPC Endpoint

Similarly, calling the /voter/simulation/rpc/{election} endpoint and providing a specific election, prompts the Voter service to request the same list of candidates. However, this time, the Voter service (the client) produces a request message and places in RabbitMQ’s voter.rpc.requests queue. The Voter service then waits for a response. The Voter service has no direct dependency on the Candidate service; it only depends on a response to its request message. In this way, it is still a form of synchronous IPC, but the Voter service is now decoupled from the Candidate service.

The request message is consumed by the Candidate service (the server), who is listening to that queue. In response, the Candidate service produces a message containing the list of candidates serialized to JSON. The Candidate service (the server) sends a response back to the Voter service (the client) through RabbitMQ. This is done using the Direct reply-to feature of RabbitMQ or using a unique response queue, specified in the reply-to header of the request message, sent by the Voter Service.

The Voter service receives the message containing the list of candidates. The Voter service deserializes the JSON payload to candidate objects. The Voter service then proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate in the list. Finally, identical to the previous example, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

New Endpoint

Calling the new /voter/simulation/db/{election} endpoint and providing a specific election, prompts the Voter service to query its own MongoDB database for a list of candidates.

But wait, where did the candidates come from? The Voter service didn’t call the Candidate service? The answer is message-based eventual consistency. Whenever a new candidate is created, using a REST HTTP POST request to the Candidate service’s /candidate/candidates endpoint, a Spring Data Rest Repository Event Handler responds. Responding to the candidate created event, the event handler publishes a message, containing a serialized JSON representation of the new candidate object, to a durable and persistent RabbitMQ queue.

The Voter service is listening to that queue. The Voter service consumes messages off the queue, deserializes the candidate object, and saves it to its own voters database, to the candidate collection. For this example, we are saving the incoming candidate object as is, with no transformations. The candidate object model for both services is identical.

When /voter/simulation/db/{election} endpoint is called, the Voter service queries its voters database for a list of candidates. They Voter service then proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate in the list. Finally, identical to the previous two examples, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

Exploring the Code

We will not review the REST HTTP or RPC IPC code in this post. It was covered in detail, in the previous post. Instead, we will explore the new code required for eventual consistency.

Spring Dependencies

To use AMQP with RabbitMQ, we need to add a project dependency on org.springframework.boot.spring-boot-starter-amqp. Below is a snippet from the Candidate service’s build.gradle file, showing project dependencies. The Voter service’s dependencies are identical.

AMQP Configuration

Next, we need to add a small amount of RabbitMQ AMQP configuration to both services. We accomplish this by using Spring’s @Configuration annotation on our configuration classes. Below is the abridged configuration class for the Voter service.

And here, the abridged configuration class for the Candidate service.

Event Handler

With our dependencies and configuration in place, we will define the CandidateEventHandler class. This class is annotated with the Spring Data Rest @RepositoryEventHandler and Spring’s @Component. The @Component annotation ensures the event handler is registered.

The class contains the handleCandidateSave method, which is annotated with the Spring Data Rest @HandleAfterCreate. The event handler acts on the Candidate object, which is the first parameter in the method signature.

Responding to the candidate created event, the event handler publishes a message, containing a serialized JSON representation of the new candidate object, to the candidates.queue queue. This was the queue we configured earlier.

Consuming Messages

Next, we let’s switch to the Voter service’s CandidateListService class. Below is an abridged version of the class with two new methods. First, the getCandidateMessage method listens to the candidates.queue queue. This was the queue we configured earlier. The method is annotated with theSpring AMQP Rabbit @RabbitListener annotation.

The getCandidateMessage retrieves the new candidate object from the message, deserializes the message’s JSON payload, maps it to the candidate object model and saves it to the Voter service’s database.

The second method, getCandidatesQueueDb, retrieves the candidates from the Voter service’s database. The method makes use of the Spring Data MongoDB Aggregation package to return a list of candidates from MongoDB.

RabbitMQ Management Console

The easiest way to observe what is happening with the messages is using the RabbitMQ Management Console. To access the console, point your web browser to localhost, on port 15672. The default login credentials for the console are guest/guest. As you successfully produce and consume messages with RabbitMQ, you should see activity on the Overview tab.

Recall we said the queue, in this example, was durable. That means messages will survive the RabbitMQ broker stopping and starting. In the below view of the RabbitMQ Management Console, note the six messages persisted in memory. The Candidate service produced the messages in response to six new candidates being created. However, the Voter service was not running, and therefore, could not consume the messages. In addition, the RabbitMQ server was restarted, after receiving the candidate messages. The messages were persisted and still present in the queue after the successful reboot of RabbitMQ.

Once RabbitMQ and the Voter service instance were back online, the Voter service successfully consumed the six waiting messages from the queue.

Service Logs

In addition to using the RabbitMQ Management Console, we may obverse communications between the two services by looking at the Voter and Candidate service’s logs. I have grabbed a snippet of both service’s logs and added a few comments to show where different processes are being executed.

First the Candidate service logs. We observe a REST HTTP POST request containing a new candidate. We then observe the creation of the new candidate object in the Candidate service’s database, followed by the event handler publishing a message on the queue. Finally, we observe the response is returned in reply to the initial REST HTTP POST request.

Now the Voter service logs. At the exact same second as the message and the response sent by the Candidate service, the Voter service consumes the message off the queue. The Voter service then deserializes the new candidate object and inserts it into its database.

MongoDB

Using the mongo Shell, we can observe six new 2016 Presidential Election candidates in the Candidate service’s database.

Now, looking at the Voter service’s database, we should find the same six 2016 Presidential Election candidates. Note the Object IDs are the same between the two service’s document sets, as are the rest of the fields (first name, last name, political party, and election). However, the class field is different between the two service’s records.

Production Considerations

The post demonstrated a simple example of message-based, event-driven eventual consistency. In an actual Production environment, there are a few things that must be considered.

We only addressed a ‘candidate created’ event. We would also have to code for other types of events, such as a ‘candidate deleted’ event and a ‘candidate updated’ event.
If a candidate is added, deleted, then re-added, are the events published and consumed in the right order? What about with multiple instances of the Voter service running? Does this pattern guarantee event ordering?
How should the Candidate service react on startup if RabbitMQ is not available
What if RabbitMQ fails after the Candidate services have started?
How should the Candidate service react if a new candidate record is added to the database, but a ‘candidate created’ event message cannot be published to RabbitMQ? The two actions are not wrapped in a single transaction.
In all of the above scenarios, what response should be returned to the API end user?

Conclusion

In this post, using eventual consistency, we successfully decoupled our two microservices and achieved asynchronous inter-process communications. Adopting a message-based, event-driven, loosely-coupled architecture, wherever possible, in combination with REST HTTP when it makes sense, will improve the overall manageability and scalability of a microservices-based platform.

References

All opinions in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current employer or their clients.

µService, DevOps, docker, Eventual Consisteny, inter-process communications, IPC, Java, loosely coupled, Messaging, Microservices, RabbitMQ, Spring Boot

2 Comments

Decoupling Microservices using Message-based RPC IPC, with Spring, RabbitMQ, and AMPQ

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in DevOps, Enterprise Software Development, Java Development, Software Development on May 8, 2017

Introduction

There has been a considerable growth in modern, highly scalable, distributed application platforms, built around fine-grained RESTful microservices. Microservices generally use lightweight protocols to communicate with each other, such as HTTP, TCP, UDP, WebSockets, MQTT, and AMQP. Microservices commonly communicate with each other directly using REST-based HTTP, or indirectly, using messaging brokers.

There are several well-known, production-tested messaging queues, such as Apache Kafka, Apache ActiveMQ, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Pivotal’s RabbitMQ. According to Pivotal, of these messaging brokers, RabbitMQ is the most widely deployed open source message broker.

RabbitMQ supports multiple messaging protocols. RabbitMQ’s primary protocol, the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), is an open standard wire-level protocol and semantic framework for high-performance enterprise messaging. According to Spring, ‘AMQP has exchanges, routes, and queues. Messages are first published to exchanges. Routes define on which queue(s) to pipe the message. Consumers subscribing to that queue then receive a copy of the message.’

Pivotal’s Spring AMQP project applies core Spring concepts to the development of AMQP-based messaging solutions. The project’s libraries facilitate management of AMQP resources while promoting the use of dependency injection and declarative configuration. The project provides a ‘template’ (RabbitTemplate) as a high-level abstraction for sending and receiving messages.

In this post, we will explore how to start moving Spring Boot Java services away from using synchronous REST HTTP for inter-process communications (IPC), and toward message-based IPC. Moving from synchronous IPC to messaging queues and asynchronous IPC decouples services from one another, allowing us to more easily build, test, and release individual microservices.

Message-Based RPC IPC

Decoupling services using asynchronous IPC is considered optimal by many enterprise software architects when developing modern distributed platforms. However, sometimes it is not easy or possible to get away from synchronous communications. Rightly or wrongly, often times services are architected, such that one service needs to retrieve data from another service or services, in order to process its own requests. It can be said, that service has a direct dependency on the other services. Many would argue, services, especially RESTful microservices, should not be coupled in this way.

There are several ways to break direct service-to-service dependencies using asynchronous IPC. We might implement request/async response REST HTTP-based IPC. We could also use publish/subscribe or publish/async response messaging queue-based IPC. These are all described by NGINX, in their article, Building Microservices: Inter-Process Communication in a Microservices Architecture; a must-read for anyone working with microservices. We might also implement an architecture which supports eventual consistency, eliminating the need for one service to obtain data from another service.

So what if we cannot implement asynchronous methods to break direct service dependencies, but we want to move toward message-based IPC? One answer is message-based Remote Procedure Call (RPC) IPC. I realize the mention of RPC might send cold shivers down the spine of many seasoned architected. Traditional RPC has several challenges, many which have been overcome with more modern architectural patterns.

According to Wikipedia, ‘in distributed computing, a remote procedure call (RPC) is when a computer program causes a procedure (subroutine) to execute in another address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network), which is coded as if it were a normal (local) procedure call, without the programmer explicitly coding the details for the remote interaction.’

Although still a form of RPC and not asynchronous, it is possible to replace REST HTTP IPC with message-based RPC IPC. Using message-based RPC, services have no direct dependencies on other services. A service only depends on a response to a message request it makes to that queue. The services are now decoupled from one another. The requestor service (the client) has no direct knowledge of the respondent service (the server).

RPC with RabbitMQ and AMQP

RabbitMQ has an excellent set of six tutorials, which cover the basics of creating messaging applications, applying different architectural patterns, using RabbitMQ, in several different programming languages. The sixth and final tutorial covers using RabbitMQ for RPC-based IPC, with the request/reply architectural pattern.

Pivotal recently added Spring AMPQ implementations to each RabbitMQ tutorial, based on their Spring AMQP project. If you recall, the Spring AMQP project applies core Spring concepts to the development of AMQP-based messaging solutions.

This post’s RPC IPC example is closely based on the architectural pattern found in the Spring AMQP RabbitMQ tutorial.

Sample Code

To demonstrate Spring AMQP-based RPC IPC messaging with RabbitMQ, we will use a pair of simple Spring Boot microservices. These services, the Voter and Candidate services, have been used in several previous posts, and for training and testing DevOps engineers. Both services are backed by MongoDB. The services and MongoDB, along with RabbitMQ, are all part of the Voter API project. The Voter API project also contains an HAProxy-based API Gateway, which provides indirect, load-balanced access to the two services.

All code necessary to build this post’s example is available on GitHub, within three projects. The Voter Service project repository contains the Voter service source code, along with the scripts and Docker Compose files required to deploy the project. The Candidate Service project repository and the Voter API Gateway project repository are also available on GitHub. For this post, you need only clone the Voter Service project repository.

Deploying Voter API

All components, including the two Spring services, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and the API Gateway, are individually deployed using Docker. Each component is publicly available as a Docker Image, on Docker Hub.

The Voter Service repository contains scripts to deploy the entire set of Dockerized components, locally. The repository also contains optional scripts to provision a Docker Swarm, using Docker’s newer swarm mode, and deploy the components. We will only deploy the services locally for this post.

To clone and deploy the components locally, including the two Spring services, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and the API Gateway, execute the following commands. If this is your first time running the commands, it may take a few minutes for your system to download all the required Docker Images from Docker Hub.

If everything was deployed successfully, you should see the following output. You should observe five running Docker containers.

Using Voter API

The Voter Service and Candidate Service GitHub repositories both contain README files, which detail all the API endpoints each service exposes, and how to call them.

In addition to casting votes for candidates, the Voter service has the ability to simulate election results. By calling a /simulation endpoint, and indicating the desired election, the Voter service will randomly generate a number of votes for each candidate in that election. This will save us the burden of casting votes for this demonstration. However, the Voter service has no knowledge of elections or candidates. To obtain a list of candidates, the Voter service depends on the Candidate service.

REST HTTP Endpoint

The Voter service exposes two almost identical endpoints. Both endpoints generate random votes. However, below the covers, the two endpoints are very different. Calling the /voter/simulation/http/{election} endpoint, prompts the Voter service to request a list of candidates from the Candidate service, based on the election parameter you input. This request is done using synchronous REST HTTP. The Voter service uses the HTTP GET method to request the data from the Candidate service. The Voter service then waits for a response.

The HTTP request is received by the Candidate service. The Candidate service responds to the Voter service with a list of candidates, in JSON format. The Voter service receives the response containing the list of candidates. The Voter service then proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate. Finally, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

Message-based RPC Endpoint

Similarly, calling the /voter/simulation/rpc/{election} endpoint with a specific election prompts the Voter service to request the same list of candidates. However, this time, the Voter service (the client), produces a request message and places in RabbitMQ’s voter.rpc.requests queue. The Voter service then waits for a response. The Voter service has no direct dependency on the Candidate service. It only depends on a response to its message request. In this way, it is still a form of synchronous IPC, but the Voter service is now decoupled from the Candidate service.

The request message is consumed by the Candidate service (the server), who is listening to that queue. In response, the Candidate service produces a message containing the list of candidates, serialized to JSON. The Candidate service (the server) sends a response back to the Voter service (the client), through RabbitMQ. This is done using the Direct reply-to feature of RabbitMQ or using a unique response queue, specified in the reply-to header of the request message, sent by the Voter Service.

According to RabbitMQ, ‘the direct reply-to feature allows RPC clients to receive replies directly from their RPC server, without going through a reply queue. (“Directly” here still means going through AMQP and the RabbitMQ server; there is no separate network connection between RPC client and RPC server.)’

According to Spring, ‘starting with version 3.4.0, the RabbitMQ server now supports Direct reply-to; this eliminates the main reason for a fixed reply queue (to avoid the need to create a temporary queue for each request). Starting with Spring AMQP version 1.4.1 Direct reply-to will be used by default (if supported by the server) instead of creating temporary reply queues. When no replyQueue is provided (or it is set with the name amq.rabbitmq.reply-to), the RabbitTemplate will automatically detect whether Direct reply-to is supported and use it, or fall back to using a temporary reply queue. When using Direct reply-to, a reply-listener is not required and should not be configured.’ We are using the latest versions of both RabbitMQ and Spring AMQP, which should support Direct reply-to.

The Voter service receives the message containing the list of candidates. The Voter service deserializes the JSON payload to Candidate objects and proceeds to generate a random number of votes for each candidate in the list. Finally, each new vote object (MongoDB document) is written back to the vote collection in the Voter service’s voters database.

Exploring the RPC Code

We will not examine the REST HTTP IPC code in this post. Instead, we will explore the RPC code. You are welcome to download the source code and explore the REST HTTP code pattern; it uses some advanced features of Spring Boot and Spring Data.

Spring Dependencies

In order to use RabbitMQ, we need to add a project dependency on org.springframework.boot.spring-boot-starter-amqp. Below is a snippet from the Candidate service’s build.gradle file, showing project dependencies. The Voter service’s dependencies are identical.

AMQP Configuration

And here, the configuration class for the Candidate service.

Candidate Service Code

With the dependencies and configuration in place, we define the method in the Voter service, which will request the candidates from the Candidate service, using RabbitMQ. Below is an abridged version of the Voter service’s CandidateListService class, containing the getCandidatesMessageRpc method. This method calls the rabbitTemplate.convertSendAndReceive method (see line 5, below).

Voter Service Code

Next, we define a method in the Candidate service, which will process the Voter service’s request. Below is an abridged version of the CandidateController class, containing the getCandidatesMessageRpc method. This method is decorated with Spring’s @RabbitListener annotation (see line 1, below). This annotation marks c to be the target of a Rabbit message listener on the voter.rpc.requests queue.

Also shown, are the getCandidatesMessageRpc method’s two helper methods, getByElection and serializeToJson. These methods query MongoDB for the list of candidates and serialize the list to JSON.

Demonstration

To demonstrate both the synchronous REST HTTP IPC code and the Spring AMQP-based RPC IPC code, we will make a few REST HTTP calls to the Voter API Gateway. For convenience, I have provided a shell script, demostrate_ipc.sh, which executes all the API calls necessary. I have added sleep commands to slow the output to the terminal down a bit, for easier analysis. The script requires HTTPie, a great time saver when working with RESTful services.

The demostrate_ipc.sh script does three things. First, it calls the Candidate service to generate a group of sample candidates. Next, the script calls the Voter service to simulate votes, using synchronous REST HTTP. Lastly, the script repeats the voter simulation, this time using message-based RPC IPC. All API calls are done through the Voter API Gateway on port 8080. To understand the API calls, examine the script, below.

Below is the list of candidates for the 2016 Presidential Election, generated by the Candidate service. The JSON payload was retrieved using the Voter service’s /voter/candidates/rpc/{election} endpoint. This endpoint uses the same RPC IPC method as the Voter service’s /voter/simulation/rpc/{election} endpoint.

Based on the list of candidates, below are the simulated election results. This JSON payload was retrieved using the Voter service’s /voter/results endpoint.

RabbitMQ Management Console

The easiest way to observe what is happening with our messages is using the RabbitMQ Management Console. To access the console, point your web-browser to localhost, on port 15672. The default login credentials for the console are guest/guest.

As you successfully send and receive messages between the services through RabbitMQ, you should see activity on the Overview tab. In addition, you should see a number of Connections, Channels, Exchanges, Queues, and Consumers.

In the Queues tab, you should find a single queue, the voter.rpc.requests queue. This queue was configured in the Candidate service’s configuration class, shown previously.

In the Exchanges tab, you should see one exchange, voter.rpc, which we configured in both the Voter and the Candidate service’s configuration classes (aka DirectExchange). Also, visible in the Exchanges tab, should be the routing key rpc, which we configured in the Candidate service’s configuration class (aka Binding).

The route binds the exchange to the voter.rpc.requests queue. If you recall Spring’s description, AMQP has exchanges (DirectExchange), routes (Binding), and queues (Queue). Messages are first published to exchanges. Routes define on which queue(s) to pipe the message. Consumers subscribing to that queue then receive a copy of the message.

In the Channels tab, you should note two connections, the single instances of the Voter and Candidate services. Likewise, there are two channels, one for each service. You can differentiate the channels by the presence of the consumer tag. The consumer tag, in this example, amq.ctag-Anv7GXs7ZWVoznO64euyjQ, uniquely identifies the consumer. In this example, the Voter service is the consumer. For a more complete explanation of the consumer tag, check out RabbitMQ’s AMQP documentation.

Message Structure

Messages cannot be viewed directly in the RabbitMQ Management Console. One way I have found to view messages is using your IDE’s debugger. Below, I have added a breakpoint on the Candidate service’ getCandidatesMessageRpc method, using IntelliJ IDEA. You can view the Voter service’s request message, as it is received by the Candidate service.

Note the message payload, the requested election. Note the twelve message header elements. The headers include the AMQP exchange, queue, and binding. The message headers also include the consumer tag. The message also uniquely identifies the reply-to queue to use, if the server does not support Direct reply-to (see earlier explanation).

Service Logs

In addition to the RabbitMQ Management Console, we may obverse communications between the two services, by looking at the Voter and Candidate service’s logs. I have grabbed a snippet of both service’s logs and added a few comments to show where different processes are being executed. First the Voter service logs.

Next, the Candidate service logs.

Performance

What about the performance of Spring AMQP RPC IPC versus REST HTTP IPC? RabbitMQ has proven to be very performant, having been clocked at one million messages per second on GCE. I performed a series of fairly ‘unscientific’ performance tests, completing 250, 500, and then 1,000 requests. The tests were performed on a six-node Docker Swarm cluster with three instances of each service in a round-robin load-balanced configuration, and a single instance of RabbitMQ. The scripts to create the swarm cluster can be found in the Voter service GitHub project.

Based on consistent test results, the speed of the two methods was almost identical. Both methods performed between 3.1 to 3.2 responses per second. For example, the Spring AMQP RPC IPC method successfully completed 1,000 requests in 5 minutes and 11 seconds, while the REST HTTP IPC method successfully completed 1,000 requests in 5 minutes and 18 seconds, 7 seconds slower than the RPC method.

There are many variables to consider, which could dramatically impact IPC performance. For example, RabbitMQ was not clustered. Also, we did not use any type of caching, such as Varnish, Memcached, or Redis. Both these could dramatically increase IPC performance.

There are also several notable differences between the two methods from a code perspective. The REST HTTP method relies on Spring Data Projection combined with Spring Data MongoDB Repository, to obtain the candidate list from MongoDB. Somewhat differently, the RPC method makes use of Spring Data MongoDB Aggregation to return a list of candidates. Therefore, the test results should be taken with a grain of salt.

Production Considerations

The post demonstrated a simple example of RPC communications between two services using Spring AMQP. In an actual Production environment, there are a few things that must be considered, as Pivotal points out:

How should either service react on startup if RabbitMQ is not available? What if RabbitMQ fails after the services have started?
How should the Voter server (the client) react if there are no Candidate service instances (the server) running?
Should the Voter service have a timeout for the RPC response to return? What should happen if the request times out?
If the Candidate service malfunctions and raises an exception, should it be forwarded to the Voter service?
How does the Voter service protect against invalid incoming messages (eg checking bounds of the candidate list) before processing?
In all of the above scenarios, what, if any, response is returned to the API end user?

Conclusion

Although in this post we did not achieve asynchronous inter-process communications, we did achieve a higher level of service decoupling, using message-based RPC IPC. Adopting a message-based, loosely-coupled architecture, whether asynchronous or synchronous, wherever possible, will improve the overall functionality and deliverability of a microservices-based platform.

References

All opinions in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current employer or their clients.garystafford/

AMQP, DevOps, HTTP, IPC, Messaging, Microservices, RabbitMQ, REST, RPC, Spring Boot

Streaming Docker Logs to Elastic Stack (ELK) using Fluentd

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Bash Scripting, DevOps, Enterprise Software Development, Software Development on April 10, 2017

Introduction

Fluentd and Docker’s native logging driver for Fluentd makes it easy to stream Docker logs from multiple running containers to the Elastic Stack. In this post, we will use Fluentd to stream Docker logs from multiple instances of a Dockerized Spring Boot RESTful service and MongoDB, to the Elastic Stack (ELK).

log_message_flow_notype

In a recent post, Distributed Service Configuration with Consul, Spring Cloud, and Docker, we built a Consul cluster using Docker swarm mode, to host distributed configurations for a Spring Boot service. We will use the resulting swarm cluster from the previous post as a foundation for this post.

Fluentd

According to the Fluentd website, Fluentd is described as an open source data collector, which unifies data collection and consumption for a better use and understanding of data. Fluentd combines all facets of processing log data: collecting, filtering, buffering, and outputting logs across multiple sources and destinations. Fluentd structures data as JSON as much as possible.

Logging Drivers

Docker includes multiple logging mechanisms to get logs from running containers and services. These mechanisms are called logging drivers. Fluentd is one of the ten current Docker logging drivers. According to Docker, The fluentd logging driver sends container logs to the Fluentd collector as structured log data. Then, users can utilize any of the various output plugins, from Fluentd, to write these logs to various destinations.

Elastic Stack

The ELK Stack, now known as the Elastic Stack, is the combination of Elastic’s very popular products: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. According to Elastic, the Elastic Stack provides real-time insights from almost any type of structured and unstructured data source.

Setup

All code for this post has been tested on both MacOS and Linux. For this post, I am provisioning and deploying to a Linux workstation, running the most recent release of Fedora and Oracle VirtualBox. If you want to use AWS or another infrastructure provider instead of VirtualBox to build your swarm, it is fairly easy to switch the Docker Machine driver and change a few configuration items in the vms_create.sh script (see Provisioning, below).

Required Software

If you want to follow along with this post, you will need the latest versions of git, Docker, Docker Machine, Docker Compose, and VirtualBox installed.

Source Code

All source code for this post is located in two GitHub repositories. The first repository contains scripts to provision the VMs, create an overlay network and persistent host-mounted volumes, build the Docker swarm, and deploy Consul, Registrator, Swarm Visualizer, Fluentd, and the Elastic Stack. The second repository contains scripts to deploy two instances of the Widget Spring Boot RESTful service and a single instance of MongoDB. You can execute all scripts manually, from the command-line, or from a CI/CD pipeline, using tools such as Jenkins.

Provisioning the Swarm

To start, clone the first repository, and execute the single run_all.sh script, or execute the seven individual scripts necessary to provision the VMs, create the overlay network and host volumes, build the swarm, and deploy Consul, Registrator, Swarm Visualizer, Fluentd, and the Elastic Stack. Follow the steps below to complete this part.

When the scripts have completed, the resulting swarm should be configured similarly to the diagram below. Consul, Registrator, Swarm Visualizer, Fluentd, and the Elastic Stack containers should be distributed across the three swarm manager nodes and the three swarm worker nodes (VirtualBox VMs).

swarm_fluentd_diagram

Deploying the Application

Next, clone the second repository, and execute the single run_all.sh script, or execute the four scripts necessary to deploy the Widget Spring Boot RESTful service and a single instance of MongoDB. Follow the steps below to complete this part.

When the scripts have completed, the Widget service and MongoDB containers should be distributed across two of the three swarm worker nodes (VirtualBox VMs).

swarm_fluentd_diagram_b

To confirm the final state of the swarm and the running container stacks, use the following Docker commands.

Open the Swarm Visualizer web UI, using any of the swarm manager node IPs, on port 5001, to confirm the swarm health, as well as the running container’s locations.

Visualizer

Lastly, open the Consul Web UI, using any of the swarm manager node IPs, on port 5601, to confirm the running container’s health, as well as their placement on the swarm nodes.

Consul_1

Streaming Logs

Elastic Stack

If you read the previous post, Distributed Service Configuration with Consul, Spring Cloud, and Docker, you will notice we deployed a few additional components this time. First, the Elastic Stack (aka ELK), is deployed to the worker3 swarm worker node, within a single container. I have increased the CPU count and RAM assigned to this VM, to minimally run the Elastic Stack. If you review the docker-compose.yml file, you will note I am using Sébastien Pujadas’ sebp/elk:latest Docker base image from Docker Hub to provision the Elastic Stack. At the time of the post, this was based on the 5.3.0 version of ELK.

Docker Logging Driver

The Widget stack’s docker-compose.yml file has been modified since the last post. The compose file now incorporates a Fluentd logging configuration section for each service. The logging configuration includes the address of the Fluentd instance, on the same swarm worker node. The logging configuration also includes a tag for each log message.

Fluentd

In addition to the Elastic Stack, we have deployed Fluentd to the worker1 and worker2 swarm nodes. This is also where the Widget and MongoDB containers are deployed. Again, looking at the docker-compose.yml file, you will note we are using a custom Fluentd Docker image, garystafford/custom-fluentd:latest, which I created. The custom image is available on Docker Hub.

The custom Fluentd Docker image is based on Fluentd’s official onbuild Docker image, fluent/fluentd:onbuild. Fluentd provides instructions for building your own custom images, from their onbuild base images.

There were two reasons I chose to create a custom Fluentd Docker image. First, I added the Uken Games’ Fluentd Elasticsearch Plugin, to the Docker Image. This highly configurable Fluentd Output Plugin allows us to push Docker logs, processed by Fluentd to the Elasticsearch. Adding additional plugins is a common reason for creating a custom Fluentd Docker image.

The second reason to create a custom Fluentd Docker image was configuration. Instead of bind-mounting host directories or volumes to the multiple Fluentd containers, to provide Fluentd’s configuration, I baked the configuration file into the immutable Docker image. The bare-bones, basicFluentd configuration file defines three processes, which are Input, Filter, and Output. These processes are accomplished using Fluentd plugins. Fluentd has 6 types of plugins: Input, Parser, Filter, Output, Formatter and Buffer. Fluentd is primarily written in Ruby, and its plugins are Ruby gems.

Fluentd listens for input on tcp port 24224, using the forward Input Plugin. Docker logs are streamed locally on each swarm node, from the Widget and MongoDB containers to the local Fluentd container, over tcp port 24224, using Docker’s fluentd logging driver, introduced earlier. Fluentd

Fluentd then filters all input using the stdout Filter Plugin. This plugin prints events to stdout, or logs if launched with daemon mode. This is the most basic method of filtering.

Lastly, Fluentd outputs the filtered input to two destinations, a local log file and Elasticsearch. First, the Docker logs are sent to a local Fluentd log file. This is only for demonstration purposes and debugging. Outputting log files is not recommended for production, nor does it meet the 12-factor application recommendations for logging. Second, Fluentd outputs the Docker logs to Elasticsearch, over tcp port 9200, using the Fluentd Elasticsearch Plugin, introduced above.

log_message_flow

Additional Metadata

In addition to the log message itself, in JSON format, the fluentd log driver sends the following metadata in the structured log message: container_id, container_name, and source. This is helpful in identifying and categorizing log messages from multiple sources. Below is a sample of log messages from the raw Fluentd log file, with the metadata tags highlighted in yellow. At the bottom of the output is a log message parsed with jq, for better readability.

fluentd_logs

Using Elastic Stack

Now that our two Docker stacks are up and running on our swarm, we should be streaming logs to Elasticsearch. To confirm this, open the Kibana web console, which should be available at the IP address of the worker3 swarm worker node, on port 5601.

Kibana

For the sake of this demonstration, I increased the verbosity of the Spring Boot Widget service’s log level, from INFO to DEBUG, in Consul. At this level of logging, the two Widget services and the single MongoDB instance were generating an average of 250-400 log messages every 30 seconds, according to Kibana.

If that seems like a lot, keep in mind, these are Docker logs, which are single-line log entries. We have not aggregated multi-line messages, such as Java exceptions and stack traces messages, into single entries. That is for another post. Also, the volume of debug-level log messages generated by the communications between the individual services and Consul is fairly verbose.

Kibana_3

Inspecting log entries in Kibana, we find the metadata tags contained in the raw Fluentd log output are now searchable fields: container_id, container_name, and source, as well as log. Also, note the _type field, with a value of ‘fluentd’. We injected this field in the output section of our Fluentd configuration, using the Fluentd Elasticsearch Plugin. The _type fiel allows us to differentiate these log entries from other potential data sources.

References

All opinions in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current employer or their clients.

consul, docker, Elastic Stack, ELK, Fluentd, Logging, Spring Boot, swarm mode

2 Comments

Diving Deeper into ‘Getting Started with Spring Cloud’

Posted by Gary A. Stafford in DevOps, Enterprise Software Development, Java Development, Software Development on February 15, 2016

Explore the integration of Spring Cloud and Spring Cloud Netflix tooling, through a deep dive into Pivotal’s ‘Getting Started with Spring Cloud’ presentation.

Introduction

Keeping current with software development and DevOps trends can often make us feel we are, as the overused analogy describes, drinking from a firehose, often several hoses at once. Recently joining a large client engagement, I found it necessary to supplement my knowledge of cloud-native solutions, built with the support of Spring Cloud and Spring Cloud Netflix technologies. One of my favorite sources of information on these subjects is presentations by people like Josh Long, Dr. Dave Syer, and Cornelia Davis of Pivotal Labs, and Jon Schneider and Taylor Wicksell of Netflix.

One presentation, in particular, Getting Started with Spring Cloud, by Long and Syer, provides an excellent end-to-end technical overview of the latest Spring and Netflix technologies. Josh Long’s fast-paced, eighty-minute presentation, available on YouTube, was given at SpringOne2GX 2015 with co-presenter, Dr. Dave Syer, founder of Spring Cloud, Spring Boot, and Spring Batch.

As the presenters of Getting Started with Spring Cloud admit, the purpose of the presentation was to get people excited about Spring Cloud and Netflix technologies, not to provide a deep dive into each technology. However, I believe the presentation’s Reservation Service example provides an excellent learning opportunity. In the following post, we will examine the technologies, components, code, and configuration presented in Getting Started with Spring Cloud. The goal of the post is to provide a greater understanding of the Spring Cloud and Spring Cloud Netflix technologies.

System Overview

Technologies

The presentation’s example introduces a dizzying array of technologies, which include:

Spring Boot
Stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based applications

Spring Data REST / Spring HATEOAS
Spring-based applications following HATEOAS principles

Spring Cloud Config
Centralized external configuration management, backed by Git

Netflix Eureka
REST-based service discovery and registration for failover and load-balancing

Netflix Ribbon
IPC library with built-in client-side software load-balancers

Netflix Zuul
Dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, security, and more

Netflix Hystrix
Latency and fault tolerance for distributed system

Netflix Hystrix Dashboard
Web-based UI for monitoring Hystrix

Spring Cloud Stream
Messaging microservices, backed by Redis

Spring Data Redis
Configuration and access to Redis from a Spring app, using Jedis

Spring Cloud Sleuth
Distributed tracing solution for Spring Cloud, sends traces via Thrift to the Zipkin collector service

Twitter Zipkin
Distributed tracing system, backed by Apache Cassandra

H2
In-memory Java SQL database, embedded and server modes

Docker
Package applications with dependencies into standardized Linux containers

System Components

Several components and component sub-systems comprise the presentation’s overall Reservation Service example. Each component implements a combination of the technologies mentioned above. Below is a high-level architectural diagram of the presentation’s example. It includes a few additional features, added as part of this post.

Overall Reservation System Diagram

Individual system components include:

Spring Cloud Config Server
Stand-alone Spring Boot application provides centralized external configuration to multiple Reservation system components

Spring Cloud Config Git Repo
Git repository containing multiple Reservation system components configuration files, served by Spring Cloud Config Server

H2 Java SQL Database Server (New)
This post substitutes the original example’s use of H2’s embedded version with a TCP Server instance, shared by Reservation Service instances

Reservation Service
Multi load-balanced instances of stand-alone Spring Boot application, backed by H2 database

Reservation Client
Stand-alone Spring Boot application (aka edge service or client-side proxy), forwards client-side load-balanced requests to the Reservation Service, using Eureka, Zuul, and Ribbon

Reservation Data Seeder (New)
Stand-alone Spring Boot application, seeds H2 with initial data, instead of the Reservation Service

Eureka Service
Stand-alone Spring Boot application provides service discovery and registration for failover and load-balancing

Hystrix Dashboard
Stand-alone Spring Boot application provides web-based Hystrix UI for monitoring system performance and Hystrix circuit-breakers

Zipkin
Zipkin Collector, Query, and Web, and Cassandra database, receives, correlates, and displays traces from Spring Cloud Sleuth

Redis
In-memory data structure store, acting as message broker/transport for Spring Cloud Stream

Github

All the code for this post is available on Github, split between two repositories. The first repository, spring-cloud-demo, contains the source code for all of the components listed above, except the Spring Cloud Config Git Repo. To function correctly, the configuration files, consumed by the Spring Cloud Config Server, needs to be placed into a separate repository, spring-cloud-demo-config-repo.

The first repository contains a git submodule , docker-zipkin. If you are not familiar with submodules, you may want to take a moment to read the git documentation. The submodule contains a dockerized version of Twitter’s OpenZipkin, docker-zipkin. To clone the two repositories, use the following commands. The --recursive option is required to include the docker-zipkin submodule in the project.

Configuration

To try out the post’s Reservation system example, you need to configure at least one property. The Spring Cloud Config Server needs to know the location of the Spring Cloud Config Repository, which is the second GitHub repository you cloned, spring-cloud-demo-config-repo. From the root of the spring-cloud-demo repo, edit the Spring Cloud Config Server application.properties file, located in config-server/src/main/resources/application.properties. Change the following property’s value to your local path to the spring-cloud-demo-config-repo repository:

Startup

There are a few ways you could run the multiple components that make up the post’s example. I suggest running one component per terminal window, in the foreground. In this way, you can monitor the output from the bootstrap and startup processes of the system’s components. Furthermore, you can continue to monitor the system’s components once they are up and running, and receiving traffic. Yes, that is twelve terminal windows…

There is a required startup order for the components. For example, Spring Cloud Config Server needs to start before the other components that rely on it for configuration. Netflix’s Eureka needs to start before the Reservation Client and ReservationServices, so they can register with Eureka on startup. Similarly, Zipkin needs to be started in its Docker container before the Reservation Client and Services, so Spring Cloud Sleuth can start sending traces. Redis needs to be started in its Docker container before Spring Cloud Stream tries to create the message queue. All instances of the Reservation Service needs to start before the Reservation Client. Once every component is started, the Reservation Data Seeder needs to be run once to create initial data in H2. For best results, follow the instructions below. Let each component start completely, before starting the next component.

Docker

Both Zipkin and Redis run in Docker containers. Redis runs in a single container. Zipkin’s four separate components run in four separate containers. Be advised, Zipkin seems to have trouble successfully starting all four of its components on a consistent basis. I believe it’s a race condition caused by Docker Compose simultaneously starting the four Docker containers, ignoring a proper startup order. More than half of the time, I have to stop Zipkin and rerun the docker command to get Zipkin to start without any errors.

If you’ve followed the instructions above, you should see the following Docker images and Docker containers installed and running in your local environment.

Components

Spring Cloud Config Server

At the center of the Reservation system is Spring Cloud Config. Configuration, typically found in the application.properties file, for the Reservation Services, Reservation Client, Reservation Data Seeder, Eureka Service, and Hystix Dashboard, has been externalized with Spring Cloud Config.

Spring_Cloud_Config_2

Each component has a bootstrap.properties file, which modifies its startup behavior during the bootstrap phase of an application context. Each bootstrap.properties file contains the component’s name and the address of the Spring Cloud Config Server. Components retrieve their configuration from the Spring Cloud Config Server at runtime. Below, is an example of the Reservation Client’s bootstrap.properties file.

Spring Cloud Config Git Repo

In the presentation, as in this post, the Spring Cloud Config Server is backed by a locally cloned Git repository, the Spring Cloud Config Git Repo. The Spring Cloud Config Server’s application.properties file contains the address of the Git repository. Each properties file within the Git repository corresponds to a system component. Below, is an example of the reservation-client.properties file, from the Spring Cloud Config Git Repo.

As shown in the original presentation, the configuration files can be viewed using HTTP endpoints of the Spring Cloud Config Server. To view the Reservation Service’s configuration stored in the Spring Cloud Config Git Repo, issue an HTTP GET request to http://localhost:8888/reservation-service/master. The master URI refers to the Git repo branch in which the configuration resides. This will return the configuration, in the response body, as JSON:

SpringCloudConfig

In a real Production environment, the Spring Cloud Config Server would be backed by a highly-available Git Server or GitHub repository.

Reservation Service

The Reservation Service is the core component in the presentation’s example. The Reservation Service is a stand-alone Spring Boot application. By implementing Spring Data REST and Spring HATEOAS, Spring automatically creates REST representations from the Reservation JPA Entity class of the Reservation Service. There is no need to write a Spring Rest Controller and explicitly code each endpoint.

HATEOAS

Spring HATEOAS allows us to interact with the Reservation Entity, using HTTP methods, such as GET and POST. These endpoints, along with all addressable endpoints, are displayed in the terminal output when a Spring Boot application starts. For example, we can use an HTTP GET request to call the reservations/{id} endpoint, such as:

The Reservation Service also makes use of the Spring RepositoryRestResource annotation. By annotating the RepositoryReservation Interface, which extends JpaRepository, we can customize export mapping and relative paths of the Reservation JPA Entity class. As shown below, the RepositoryReservation Interface contains the findByReservationName method signature, annotated with /by-name endpoint, which accepts the rn input parameter.

Calling the findByReservationName method, we can search for a particular reservation by using an HTTP GET request to call the reservations/search/by-name?rn={reservationName} endpoint.

Spring Screengrab 04

Reservation Client

Querying the Reservation Service directly is possible, however, is not the recommended. Instead, the presentation suggests using the Reservation Client as a proxy to the Reservation Service. The presentation offers three examples of using the Reservation Client as a proxy.

The first demonstration of the Reservation Client uses the /message endpoint on the Reservation Client to return a string from the Reservation Service. The message example has been modified to include two new endpoints on the Reservation Client. The first endpoint, /reservations/client-message, returns a message directly from the Reservation Client. The second endpoint, /reservations/service-message, returns a message indirectly from the Reservation Service. To retrieve the message from the Reservation Service, the Reservation Client sends a request to the endpoint Reservation Service’s /message endpoint.

To retrieve both messages, send separate HTTP GET requests to each endpoint:

Spring Screengrab 02

The second demonstration of the Reservation Client uses a Data Transfer Object (DTO). Calling the Reservation Client’s reservations/names endpoint, invokes the getReservationNames method. This method, in turn, calls the Reservation Service’s /reservations endpoint. The response object returned from the Reservation Service, a JSON array of reservation records, is deserialized and mapped to the Reservation Client’s Reservation DTO. Finally, the method returns a collection of strings, representing just the names from the reservations.

To retrieve the collection of reservation names, an HTTP GET request is sent to the /reservations/names endpoint:

Spring Screengrab 05

Spring Cloud Stream

One of the more interesting technologies in the presentation is Spring’s Spring Cloud Stream. The Spring website describes Spring Cloud Stream as a project that allows users to develop and run messaging microservices using Spring Integration. In other words, it provides native Spring messaging capabilities, backed by a choice of message buses, including Redis, RabbitMQ, and Apache Kafka, to Spring Boot applications.

A detailed explanation of Spring Cloud Stream would take an entire post. The best technical demonstration I have found is the presentation, Message Driven Microservices in the Cloud, by speakers Dr. David Syer and Dr. Mark Pollack, given in January 2016, also at SpringOne2GX 2015.

Diagram_03

In the presentation, a new reservation is submitted via an HTTP POST to the acceptNewReservations method of the Reservation Client. The method, in turn, builds (aka produces) a message, containing the new reservation, and publishes that message to the queue.reservation queue.

The queue.reservation queue is located in Redis, which is running inside a Docker container. To view the messages being published to the queue in real-time, use the redis-cli, with the monitor command, from within the Redis Docker container. Below is an example of tests messages pushed (LPUSH) to the reservations queue from the Reservation Client.

The published messages are consumed by subscribers to the reservation queue. In this example, the consumer is the Reservation Service. The Reservation Service’s acceptNewReservation method processes the message and saves the new reservation to the H2 database. In Spring Cloud Stream terms, the Reservation Client is the Sink.

Netflix Eureka

Netflix’s Eureka, in combination with Netflix’s Zuul and Ribbon, provide the ability to scale the Reservation Service horizontally, and to load balance those instances. By using the @EnableEurekaClient annotation on the Reservation Client and Reservation Services, each instance will automatically register with Eureka on startup, as shown in the Eureka Web UI, below.

Diagram9

The names of the registered instances are in three parts: the address of the host on which the instance is running, followed by the value of the spring.application.name property of the instance’s bootstrap.properties file, and finally, the port number the instance is running on. Eureka displays each instance’s status, along with additional AWS information, if you are running on AWS, as Netflix does.

Diagram_07

According to Spring in their informative post, Spring Cloud, service discovery is one of the key tenets of a microservice based architecture. Trying to hand-configure each client, or to rely on convention over configuration, can be difficult to do and is brittle. Eureka is the Netflix Service Discovery Server and Client. A client (Spring Boot application), registers with Eureka, providing metadata about itself. Eureka then receives heartbeat messages from each instance. If the heartbeat fails over a configurable timetable, the instance is normally removed from the registry.

The Reservation Client application is also annotated with @EnableZuulProxy. Adding this annotation pulls in Spring Cloud’s embedded Zuul proxy. Again, according to Spring, the proxy is used by front-end applications to proxy calls to one or more back-end services, avoiding the need to manage CORS and authentication concerns independently for all the backends. In the presentation and this post, the front end is the Reservation Client and the back end is the Reservation Service.

In the code snippet below from the ReservationApiGatewayRestController, note the URL of the endpoint requested in the getReservationNames method. Instead of directly calling http://localhost:8000/reservations, the method calls http://reservation-service/reservations. The reservation-service segment of the URL is the registered name of the service in Eureka and contained in the Reservation Service’s bootstrap.properties file.

In the following abridged output from the Reservation Client, you can clearly see the interaction of Zuul, Ribbon, Eureka, and Spring Cloud Config. Note the Client application has successfully registering itself with Eureka, along with the Reservation Client’s status. Also, note Zuul mapping the Reservation Service’s URL path.

Load Balancing

One shortcoming of the original presentation was true load balancing. With only a single instance of the Reservation Service in the original presentation, there is nothing to load balance; it’s more of a reverse proxy example. To demonstrate load balancing, we need to spin up additional instances of the Reservation Service. Following the post’s component start-up instructions, we should have three instances of the Reservation Service running, on ports 8000, 8001, and 8002, each in separate terminal windows.

To confirm the three instances of the Reservation Service were successfully registered with Eureka, review the output from the Eureka Server terminal window. The output should show three instances of the Reservation Service registering on startup, in addition to the Reservation Client.

Viewing Eureka’s web console, we should observe three members in the pool of Reservation Services.

Diagram9b

Lastly, looking at the terminal output of the Reservation Client, we should see three instances of the Reservation Service being returned by Ribbon (aka the DynamicServerListLoadBalancer).

Requesting

Requesting http://localhost:8050/reservations/names, Ribbon forwards the request to one of the three Reservation Service instances registered with Eureka. By default, Ribbon uses a round-robin load-balancing strategy to select an instance from the pool of available Reservation Services.

H2 Server

The original presentation’s Reservation Service used an embedded instance of H2. To scale out the Reservation Service, we need a common database for multiple instances to share. Otherwise, queries would return different results, specific to the particular instance of Reservation Service chosen by the load-balancer. To solve this, the original presentation’s embedded version of H2 has been replaced with the TCP Server client/server version of H2.

Reservation Service Instances

Thanks to more Spring magic, the only change we need to make to the original presentation’s code is a few additional properties added to the Reservation Service’s reservation-service.properties file. This changes H2 from the embedded version to the TCP Server version.

Reservation Data Seeder

In the original presentation, the Reservation Service created several sample reservation records in its embedded H2 database on startup. Since we now have multiple instances of the Reservation Service running, the sample data creation task has been moved from the Reservation Service to the new Reservation Data Seeder. The Reservation Service only now validates the H2 database schema on startup. The Reservation Data Seeder now updates the schema based on its entities. This also means the seed data will be persisted across restarts of the Reservation Service, unlike in the original configuration.

Running the Reservation Data Seeder once will create several reservation records into the H2 database. To confirm the H2 Server is running and the initial reservation records were created by the Reservation Data Seeder, point your web browser to the H2 login page at http://192.168.99.1:6889. and log in using the credentials in the reservation-service.properties file.

H2_grab1

The H2 Console should contain the RESERVATION table, which holds the reservation sample records.

H2_grab2

Spring Cloud Sleuth and Twitter’s Zipkin

According to the project description, “Spring Cloud Sleuth implements a distributed tracing solution for Spring Cloud. All your interactions with external systems should be instrumented automatically. You can capture data simply in logs, or by sending it to a remote collector service.” In our case, that remote collector service is Zipkin.

Zipkin describes itself as, “a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in microservice architectures. It manages both the collection and lookup of this data through a Collector and a Query service.” Zipkin provides critical insights into how microservices perform in a distributed system.

Zipkin_Diagram

In the presentation, as in this post, the Reservation Client’s main ReservationClientApplication class contains the alwaysSampler bean, which returns a new instance of org.springframework.cloud.sleuth.sampler.AlwaysSampler. As long as Spring Cloud Sleuth is on the classpath and you have added alwaysSampler bean, the Reservation Client will automatically generate trace data.

Sending a request to the Reservation Client’s service/message endpoint (http://localhost:8050/reservations/service-message,), will generate a trace, composed of spans. in this case, the spans are individual segments of the HTTP request/response lifecycle. Traces are sent by Sleuth to Zipkin, to be collected. According to Spring, if spring-cloud-sleuth-zipkin is available, then the application will generate and collect Zipkin-compatible traces using Brave). By default, it sends them via Apache Thrift to a Zipkin collector service on port 9410.

Zipkin’s web-browser interface, running on port 8080, allows us to view traces and drill down into individual spans.

Zipkin_UI

Zipkin contains fine-grain details about each span within a trace, as shown below.

Zipkin_UI_Popup

Correlation IDs

Note the x-trace-id and x-span-id in the request header, shown below. Sleuth injects the trace and span IDs to the SLF4J MDC (Simple Logging Facade for Java – Mapped Diagnostic Context). According to Spring, IDs provides the ability to extract all the logs from a given trace or span in a log aggregator. The use of correlation IDs and log aggregation are essential for monitoring and supporting a microservice architecture.

Zipkin_UI_Popup2

Hystix and Hystrix Dashboard

The last major technology highlighted in the presentation is Netflix’s Hystrix. According to Netflix, “Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems, services, and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.” Hystrix is essential, it protects applications from cascading dependency failures, an issue common to complex distributed architectures, with multiple dependency chains. According to Netflix, Hystrix uses multiple isolation techniques, such as bulkhead, swimlane, and circuit breaker patterns, to limit the impact of any one dependency on the entire system.

The presentation demonstrates one of the simpler capabilities of Hystrix, fallback. The getReservationNames method is decorated with the @HystrixCommand annotation. This annotation contains the fallbackMethod. According to Netflix, a graceful degradation of a method is provided by adding a fallback method. Hystrix will call to obtain a default value or values, in case the main command fails. In the presentation’s example, the Reservation Service, a direct dependency of the Reservation Client, has failed. The Reservation Service failure causes the failure of the Reservation Client.

In the presentation’s example, the Reservation Service, a direct dependency of the Reservation Client, has failed. The Reservation Service failure causes the failure of the Reservation Client’s getReservationNames method to return a collection of reservation names. Hystrix redirects the application to the getReservationNameFallback method. Instead of returning a collection of reservation names, the getReservationNameFallback returns an empty collection, as opposed to an error message to the client.

A more relevant example involves Netflix movie recommendation service. In the event a failure of the recommendation service’s method to return a collection of personalized list of movie recommendations to a customer, Hystrix fallbacks to a method that returns a generic list of the most popular movies to the customer. Netflix has determined that, in the event of a failure of their recommendation service, falling back to a generic list of movies is better than returning no movies at all.

The Hystrix Dashboard is a tool, available with Hystrix, to visualize the current state of Hystrix instrumented methods. Although visually simplistic, the dashboard effectively presents the health of calls to external systems, which are wrapped in a HystrixCommand or HystrixObservableCommand.

Hystrix_Stream_Diagram

The Hystrix dashboard is a visual representation of the Hystrix Stream. This stream is a live feed of data sent by the Hystrix instrumented application, in this case, the Reservation Client. For a single Hystrix application, such as the Reservation Client, the feed requested from the application’s hystrix.stream endpoint is http://localhost:8050/hystrix.stream. The dashboard consumes the stream resource’s response and visualizes it in the browser using JavaScript, jQuery, and d3.

In the post, as in the presentation, hitting the Reservation Client with a volume of requests, we observe normal activity in Hystrix Dashboard. All three instances of the Reservation Service are running and returning the collection of reservations from H2, to the Reservation Client.

Hystrix_success

If all three instances of the Reservation Service fail or the maximum latency is exceeded, the Reservation Client falls back to returning an empty collection in the response body. In the example below, 15 requests, representing 100% of the current traffic, to the getReservationNames method failed and subsequently fell back to return an empty collection. Hystrix succeeded in helping the application gracefully fall back to an alternate response.

Hystrix_failures

Conclusion

It’s easy to see how Spring Cloud and Netflix’s technologies are easily combined to create a performant, horizontally scalable, reliable system. With the addition of a few missing components, such metrics monitoring and log aggregation, this example could easily be scaled up to support a production-grade microservices-based, enterprise software platform.

docker, Eureka, H2, Hystrix, Java, Netflix, Redis, REST, Ribbon, Sleuth, Spring, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Cloud Config, Zipkin, Zuul

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