Spring Cloud summary notes

I will be sharing my Spring Cloud stack notes here.

2. Spring-Cloud-Config

2.7 Environment Changes

The application will listen for an EnvironmentChangeEvent and react to the change in a couple of standard ways (additional ApplicationListeners can be added as @Beans by the user in the normal way). When an EnvironmentChangeEvent is observed it will have a list of key values that have changed, and the application will use those to:

Re-bind any @ConfigurationProperties beans in the context

Set the logger levels for any properties in logging.level.*

Note that the Config Client does not by default poll for changes in the Environment, and generally we would not recommend that approach for detecting changes (although you could set it up with a @Scheduled annotation). If you have a scaled-out client application then it is better to broadcast the EnvironmentChangeEventto all the instances instead of having them polling for changes (e.g. using the Spring Cloud Bus).

The EnvironmentChangeEvent covers a large class of refresh use cases, as long as you can actually make a change to the Environment and publish the event (those APIs are public and part of core Spring). You can verify the changes are bound to @ConfigurationProperties beans by visiting the /configpropsendpoint (normal Spring Boot Actuator feature). For instance a DataSource can have its maxPoolSize changed at runtime (the default DataSource created by Spring Boot is an @ConfigurationProperties bean) and grow capacity dynamically. Re-binding @ConfigurationProperties does not cover another large class of use cases, where you need more control over the refresh, and where you need a change to be atomic over the whole ApplicationContext. To address those concerns we have @RefreshScope.

http://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-static/Finchley.M5/multi/multi__spring_cloud_context_application_context_services.html#_environment_changes

 

2.10 Endpoints

For a Spring Boot Actuator application there are some additional management endpoints:

POST to /env to update the Environment and rebind @ConfigurationProperties and log levels

/refresh for re-loading the boot strap context and refreshing the @RefreshScope beans

/restart for closing the ApplicationContext and restarting it (disabled by default)

/pause and /resume for calling the Lifecycle methods (stop() and start() on the ApplicationContext)

3. Spring Cloud Commons: Common Abstractions

Patterns such as service discovery, load balancing and circuit breakers lend themselves to a common abstraction layer that can be consumed by all Spring Cloud clients, independent of the implementation (e.g. discovery via Eureka or Consul).

10. Spring Cloud Config Client

10.2 Discovery First Bootstrap

If you are using a `DiscoveryClient implementation, such as Spring Cloud Netflix and Eureka Service Discovery or Spring Cloud Consul (Spring Cloud Zookeeper does not support this yet), then you can have the Config Server register with the Discovery Service if you want to, but in the default “Config First” mode, clients won’t be able to take advantage of the registration.

If you prefer to use DiscoveryClient to locate the Config Server, you can do that by setting spring.cloud.config.discovery.enabled=true (default “false”). The net result of that is that client apps all need a bootstrap.yml (or an environment variable) with the appropriate discovery configuration. For example, with Spring Cloud Netflix, you need to define the Eureka server address, e.g. in eureka.client.serviceUrl.defaultZone. The price for using this option is an extra network round trip on start up to locate the service registration. The benefit is that the Config Server can change its co-ordinates, as long as the Discovery Service is a fixed point. The default service id is “configserver” but you can change that on the client with spring.cloud.config.discovery.serviceId (and on the server in the usual way for a service, e.g. by setting spring.application.name).

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