A Deep Dive Into Spring Cloud Load Balancer

Spring Cloud is currently on the verge of large changes. I have been writing about it in my previous article A New Era of Spring Cloud. While almost all of Spring Cloud Netflix components will be removed in the next release, it seems that the biggest change is a replacement of Ribbon client into Spring Cloud Load Balancer.

A New Era Of Spring Cloud

Almost 1.5 years ago Spring Team has announced the decision of moving the most of Spring Cloud Netflix components into maintenance mode. It means that new features have no longer been added to these modules beginning from Greenwich Release Train. Currently, they are starting work on Ilford Release Train, which is removing such popular projects like Ribbon, Hystrix, or Zuul from Spring Cloud. The only module that will still be used is a Netflix discovery server — Eureka.
This change is significant for Spring Cloud since from beginning it was recognized by its integration with Netflix components. Moreover, Spring Cloud Netflix is still the most popular Spring Cloud project on GitHub (~4k stars).

Using New Spring Cloud Load Balancer In Microservices Communication

Almost a year ago Spring Cloud has announced that most of Spring Cloud Netflix OSS projects will be moved to the maintenance mode starting from Spring Cloud Greenwich Release Train. In fact the maintenance mode only does not include Eureka, which still will be supported. I referred to that information in one of my previous articles The Future of Spring Cloud Microservices After Netflix Era. I have shared there some opinions about future of microservices with Spring Cloud. Of course, I also included an example of building microservices architecture without Netflix OSS using HashiCorp’s Consul, Spring Cloud Gateway and an early version of Spring Cloud LoadBalancer.

The Future of Spring Cloud Microservices After Netflix Era

If somebody would ask you about Spring Cloud, the first thing that comes into your mind will probably be Netflix OSS support. Support for such tools like Eureka, Zuul or Ribbon is provided not only by Spring, but also by some other popular frameworks used for building microservices architecture like Apache Camel, Vert.x or Micronaut. Currently, Spring Cloud Netflix is the most popular project being a part of Spring Cloud. It has around 3.2k stars on GitHub, while the second best has around 1.4k. Therefore, it is quite surprising that Pivotal has announced that most of Spring Cloud Netflix modules are entering maintenance mode. You can read more about in the post published on the Spring blog by Spencer Gibb https://spring.io/blog/2018/12/12/spring-cloud-greenwich-rc1-available-now.