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Service discovery for microservices with mu

NOTE:  Beginning with mu 1.5.1, Consul support has been replaced with Amazon ECS Service Discovery.  A new mu extension called mu-consul is under development to provide support for Consul as a service discovery provider.
 
mu is a tool that makes it simple and cost-efficient for developers to use AWS as the platform for running their microservices.  In this fourth post of the blog series focused on the mu tool, we will use mu to setup Consul for service discovery between multiple microservices.  

Why do I need service discovery?

One of the biggest benefits of a microservices architecture is that the services can be deployed independently of one another.  However, this presents a new challenge in that it becomes difficult for clients to know the list of containers to use when invoking the service.  Here are three different approaches to address this challenge:

There are three concerns with this approach.  First, the endpoint address of the load balancer must never change or else all the clients will be broken and require updates to take the new endpoint address.  This can be addressed via DNS CNAME records, but still requires that the name chosen for the record must not change.  Second, there is the additional cost of a load balancer for every microservice.  Finally, there is additional latency introduced with adding a load balancer between each microservice invocation.

The concern with this approach is that all traffic is now flowing through a single load balancer which can become a constraint in scaling the entire system.  Additionally, the load balancer becomes a shared resource amongst all the microservice teams, potentially impacting a team’s ability to operate independently of other teams.

The benefit with this approach is there are no longer load balancers between each microservice request so all the concerns with those prior approaches are addressed.  However, a new type microservice, an edge service, will need to be deployed to allow clients outside the microservice environment (that do not have access to service discovery) to invoke the service.

The preferred approach is the third approach which uses service discovery and client side load balancing within the microservice environment and edge routing with traditional load balancing for clients outside the microservice environment.  This approach provides the lowest latency and most loosely coupled solution for microservice invocation.

Let mu help!

The environment that mu creates for your microservice can manage the provisioning of Consul for service discovery and registration of your microservices.  Consul is a sort of phonebook for microservices.  It provides APIs for services to register their endpoints and for clients to lookup the endpoints.
Let’s demonstrate this by adding an additional milkshake service to the invoke the banana service from the first post.  Additionally, we will create a zuul router service to provide an edge service via Netflix’s Zuul.  Zuul is a proxy service that serves as the front door for all requests from outside the microservice environment.  Zuul will use Consul for service discovery to determine where best to route the incoming request.  Additionally, Zuul provides an excellent location to enforce policies such as authentication, authorization or logging on all incoming requests.

Enabling Consul and Edge Router

The first thing we will want to do is set up our edge router with Zuul.  This is just a matter of adding the @EnableZuulProxy and @EnableDiscoveryClient annotations to the Spring Boot application:

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

Zuul is configured via the application.yml file in src/main/resources.  For each service that we want exposed via the edge router, we add URI path patterns:

spring:
  application:
    name: zuul-router
zuul:
  routes:
    milkshake-service:
      path: /milkshakes/**
      stripPrefix: false
    banana-service:
      path: /bananas/**
      stripPrefix: false

In order to enable Consul in your environment, you need to update the environment definition in the mu.yml file.  Additionally, you need to configure Spring Cloud Consul to connect to the docker host ip address for service discovery.  We will also want to configure Spring Cloud to not register with Consul, since mu will already configure the Registrator agent on your ECS container instances:

 environments:
 - name: acceptance
   cluster:
     maxSize: 5
   discovery:
     provider: consul
 - name: production
service:
  name: zuul-router
  port: 8080
  pathPatterns:
  - /*
  environment:
    SPRING_CLOUD_CONSUL_HOST: 172.17.0.1
    SPRING_CLOUD_CONSUL_DISCOVERY_REGISTER: 'false'
  pipeline:
    source:
      provider: GitHub
      repo: cplee/zuul-router
    build:
      image: aws/codebuild/java:openjdk-8

Create Milkshake Service

Now we can create a new service to manage the creation of milkshakes.  The service looks very similar to the banana service, with the exception of declaring a Spring RestTemplate annotated with @LoadBalanced to enable client side loadbalancing via Ribbon.
 

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableDiscoveryClient
public class MilkshakeApplication {
  @LoadBalanced
  @Bean
  RestTemplate restTemplate(){
     return new RestTemplate();
  }
}

Now we can use the RestTemplate to make calls directly to the banana service.  Ribbon will do a lookup in Consul for a service named banana-service and replace it in the URL with one of the container’s IP and port:

@Component
public class BananaProvider implements FlavorProvider {
  @Autowired
  private RestTemplate restTemplate;
  private List<Map<String,Object>> getAll() {
    ParameterizedTypeReference<List<Map<String, Object>>> typeRef =
            new ParameterizedTypeReference<List<Map<String, Object>>>() {};
    ResponseEntity<List<Map<String, Object>>> exchange =
            this.restTemplate.exchange("http://banana-service/bananas",HttpMethod.GET,null, typeRef);

    return exchange.getBody();
  } 

Try it out!

After we have deployed all three services, we can use mu to confirm that all are running as expected.

~ ??? mu env show acceptance                                                                                                                                                                                                       
Environment:    acceptance
Cluster Stack:  mu-cluster-dev (UPDATE_COMPLETE)
VPC Stack:      mu-vpc-dev (UPDATE_COMPLETE)
Bastion Host:   35.164.117.25
Base URL:       http://mu-cl-EcsEl-144KXQMIRY9WI-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com

Container Instances:
+---------------------+----------+--------------+------------+-----------+--------+---------+-----------+-----------+
|    EC2 INSTANCE     |   TYPE   |     AMI      |     AZ     | CONNECTED | STATUS | # TASKS | CPU AVAIL | MEM AVAIL |
+---------------------+----------+--------------+------------+-----------+--------+---------+-----------+-----------+
| i-08e3edc8c644f0534 | t2.micro | ami-62d35c02 | us-west-2b | true      | ACTIVE |       3 |       604 |       139 |
| i-05bc14a67e53889e1 | t2.micro | ami-62d35c02 | us-west-2a | true      | ACTIVE |       3 |       604 |       139 |
| i-0b56a0d9572531e9e | t2.micro | ami-62d35c02 | us-west-2c | true      | ACTIVE |       3 |       604 |       139 |
| i-05b2188a5c575fbeb | t2.micro | ami-62d35c02 | us-west-2b | true      | ACTIVE |       1 |       624 |       739 |
+---------------------+----------+--------------+------------+-----------+--------+---------+-----------+-----------+
Services:
+-------------------+---------------------------+------------------+---------------------+
|      SERVICE      |         IMAGE             |      STATUS      |     LAST UPDATE     |
+-------------------+---------------------------+------------------+---------------------+
| milkshake-service | milkshake-service:9e4bcd9 | CREATE_COMPLETE  | 2017-05-12 11:33:05 |
| zuul-router       | zuul-router:3d4795c       | UPDATE_COMPLETE  | 2017-05-12 12:09:47 | 
| banana-service    | banana-service:3b62124    | UPDATE_COMPLETE  | 2017-05-12 11:32:55 |
+-------------------+---------------------------+------------------+---------------------+

We can then use curl to get a list of all the bananas available via the banana-service:

curl -s http://mu-cl-EcsEl-144KXQMIRY9WI-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/bananas | jq
[
  {
    "pickedAt": null,
    "peeled": null,
    "links": [
      {
        "rel": "self",
        "href": "http://mu-cl-ecsel-144kxqmiry9wi-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/bananas/9"
      }
    ]
  }
]

Next we try to create a milkshake using the milkshake-service:

~ ??? curl -s -d "{}" -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://mu-cl-EcsEl-144KXQMIRY9WI-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/milkshakes\?flavor\=Banana | jq                                                                         
{
  "timestamp": "2017-05-15T19:12:56.640+0000",
  "status": 500,
  "error": "Internal Server Error",
  "exception": "org.springframework.web.client.HttpClientErrorException",
  "message": "429 Not enough bananas to make the shake.",
  "path": "/milkshakes"
}

Looks like there aren’t enough bananas to create a milkshake.  Let’s create another one:

~ ??? curl -s -d "{}" -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://mu-cl-EcsEl-144KXQMIRY9WI-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/bananas
~ ??? curl -s http://mu-cl-EcsEl-144KXQMIRY9WI-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/bananas | jq                                                                                                                         
[
  {
    "pickedAt": null,
    "peeled": null,
    "links": [
      {
        "rel": "self",
        "href": "http://mu-cl-ecsel-144kxqmiry9wi-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/bananas/9"
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "pickedAt": null,
    "peeled": null,
    "links": [
      {
        "rel": "self",
        "href": "http://mu-cl-ecsel-144kxqmiry9wi-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/bananas/10"
      }
    ]
  }
]

Now let’s try again creating a milkshake:

~ ??? curl -s -d "{}" -H "application/json" http://mu-cl-EcsEl-144KXQMIRY9WI-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/milkshakes\?flavor\=Banana | jq                                                                      
{
  "id": 3,
  "flavor": "Banana"
}

This time it worked, and if we query the list of bananas again, we see that 2 have been deleted for the milkshake:

~ ??? curl -s http://mu-cl-EcsEl-144KXQMIRY9WI-1411768500.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/bananas | jq                                                                                                                        
[]

Conclusion

Decomposing a monolithic application into microservices presents an interesting challenge in enabling services to invoke one another while still keeping the services loosely coupled.  Using a client side load balancer like Ribbon along with a service discovery tool like Consul provide an excellent solution to this challenge.  As demonstrated in this post, mu makes it simple to enable service discovery in your microservice environment to help achieve this solution.  Head over to stelligent/mu on GitHub and get started!

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