Cloud Native Spring: Discovery and Configuration

In this sessions we'll see how to use components of Spring Cloud to configure and discover microservices in a cloud native microservice-architected application. Specifically, we'll look at Spring Cloud Netflix and Netflix' Eureka and Ribbon projects for service discovery as well as the Spring Cloud Config project's configuration server to provide a central point of external configuration.

Microservice-architecture presents many benefits, not the least of which include opportunities to develop, evolve, scale, test, and deploy individual modules of an application independently from the rest of the application. But once an application is broken apart, a new set of challenges arises.

If the individual microservices are to work together in service of the greater application, then they must know about each other. Rather than hardcode the specifics of each microservice within every other microservice, it's better to provide a registry with which a service can register and other services may use to lookup those service details.

Microservices, like any application, will also likely depend on application-level configuration. It's generally a good idea to keep that configuration separate from the application itself, and this is even more true with microservices. Using a centralized configuration service, microservices can obtain their configuration details, some of which may be shared across many microservices. Because it is separate from the application/microservice code, that configuration itself can be versioned and evolve at a pace independent of the microservices it serves.