Circuit breaker and retries on Kubernetes with Istio and Spring Boot

An ability to handle communication failures in an inter-service communication is an absolute necessity for every single service mesh framework. It includes handling of timeouts and HTTP error codes. In this article I’m going to show how to configure retry and circuit breaker mechanisms using Istio. The same as for the previous article about Istio Service mesh on Kubernetes with Istio and Spring Boot we will analyze a communication between two simple Spring Boot applications deployed on Kubernetes. But instead of very basic example we are going to discuss more advanced topics.

Circuit Breaking In Spring Cloud Gateway With Resilience4J

In the newest version of Spring Cloud Gateway (2.2.1) we may take an advantage of a new implementation of circuit breaker built on top of project Resilience4J (https://github.com/resilience4j/resilience4j). Resilience4J has been selected as a replacement for Netflix’s Hystrix, that had been moved to the maintenance mode. Of course, you can still use Hystrix as circuit breaker implementation, however it is deprecated and probably won’t be available in the future versions of Spring Cloud. A new implementation is called no different than just Spring Cloud Circuit Breaker.

Spring Boot Best Practices for Microservices

In this article I’m going to propose my list of “golden rules” for building Spring Boot applications, which are a part of microservices-based system. I’m basing on my experience in migrating monolithic SOAP applications running on JEE servers into REST-based small applications built on top of Spring Boot. This list of best practices assumes you are running many microservices on the production under a huge incoming traffic. Let’s begin.