If Zuul is connected to a Eureka server, it can automatically add fault tolerance and client-side load balancing to the services it proxies. Manually configuring Ribbon to load balance your services is a great feature, but it’s just the beginning of what the Spring Cloud suite can do. Open a browser to and you’ll see the complete site. Then launch the server locally by executing this command: $ heroku local webĪfter a few moments, the embedded Tomcat server will be ready to handle requests. Build the project by running this command: $. It also disables Eureka discovery for Ribbon because you don’t have a Eureka server. If the first host goes down, the proxy will failover to the second host. The httpbin entry defines the available servers: and its European counterpart, eu. This configuration tells Zuul to forward all requests to the httpbin service, which is defined after the zuul entry. Open the src/main/resources/application.yml and replace the zuul configuration with this code: zuul: Then clone the app you deployed earlier by running this command (but replace “” with the name of your Heroku app): $ heroku git:clone All you need to do is enable them.įirst, make sure you have the Heroku toolbelt installed. Both projects are part of the Netflix OSS suite, which means they integrate seamlessly with Zuul. The Zuul server you deployed comes pre-packaged with Ribbon, a client-side load-balancer, and Hystrix, a fault tolerance library. Zuul has the ability to load-balance its services and failover to an alternative service if the primary host goes down. This is the simplest and easiest way to configure the proxy, but it’s also very static and can’t adjust to changes or failures in your system.
There is also an entry that disables Eureka service discovery, but that has been omitted here. Each route has a path, which defines the URL mapping in the Zuul server, and a url, which defines the URL of the remote service to proxy. The configuration contains three named routes. The demo uses the following configuration located in the src/main/resources/application.yml file of the demo project: zuul: It will appear to you that the services are running in the app you just deployed but you are actually viewing services from another application ( ), which are proxied through the Zuul server. When the app opens, it will display links to the services that Zuul exposes. When the deployment is complete, click the “View” link at the bottom of the page. To begin, deploy the Heroku Zuul server demo project by clicking this button: This service requires very little code, and can be used with microservices written in any language-not just Java. Thanks to Netflix and the Spring Cloud project, you can deploy a Zuul server on Heroku in just a few minutes. You can integrate Zuul with other Netflix projects like Hystrix for fault tolerance and Eureka for service discovery, or use it to manage routing rules, filters, and load balancing across your system. It provides a unified “front door” to your system, which allows a browser, mobile app, or other user interface to consume services from multiple hosts without managing cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and authentication for each one. Zuul is an edge service that proxies requests to multiple backing services.
To solve this problem, Netflix (a major adopter of microservices) created and open-sourced its Zuul proxy server. The fact that your services are split into small composable apps shouldn’t be visible to users or result in substantial development effort. A common challenge when building microservices is providing a unified interface to the consumers of your system.