Timeouts and Retries In Spring Cloud Gateway

In this article I’m going to describe two features of Spring Cloud Gateway: retrying based on GatewayFilter pattern and timeouts based on a global configuration. In some previous articles in this series I have described rate limiting based on Redis, and circuit breaker built with Resilience4J. For more details about those two features you may refer to the following blog posts:

• Rate Limiting In Spring Cloud Gateway with Redis
• Circuit Breaking in Spring Cloud Gateway with Resilience4J

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.

Reactive Elasticsearch With Spring Boot

One of more notable feature introduced in the latest release of Spring Data is reactive support for Elasticsearch. Since Spring Data Moore we can take advantage of reactive template and repository. It is built on top of fully reactive Elasticsearch REST client, that is based on Spring WebClient. It is also worth to mention about support for reactive Querydsl, which can be included to your application through ReactiveQueryPredicateExecutor.

Part 1: Testing Kafka Microservices With Micronaut

I have already described how to build microservices architecture entirely based on message-driven communication through Apache Kafka in one of my previous articles Kafka In Microservices With Micronaut. As you can see in the article title the sample applications and integration with Kafka has been built on top of Micronaut Framework. I described some interesting features of Micronaut, that can be used for building message-driven microservices, but I specially didn’t write anything about testing. In this article I’m going to show you how to test your Kafka microservice using Micronaut Test core features (Component Tests), Testcontainers (Integration Tests) and Pact (Contract Tests).

Elasticsearch with Spring Boot

Elasticsearch is a full-text search engine especially designed for working with large data sets. Following this description it is a natural choice to use it for storing and searching application logs. Together with Logstash and Kibana it is a part of powerful solution called Elastic Stack, that has already been described in some of my previous articles.
Keeping application logs is not the only one use case for Elasticsearch. It is often used as a secondary database for the application, that has primary relational database. Such an approach can be especially useful if you have to perform full-text search over large data set or just store many historical records that are no longer modified by the application. Of course there is always question about advantages and disadvantages of that approach.
When you are working with two different data sources that contain the same data, you have to first think about synchronization. You have several options. Depending on the relational database vendor, you can leverage binary or transaction logs, which contain the history of SQL updates. This approach requires some middleware that reads logs and then puts data to Elasticsearch. You can always move the whole responsibility to the database side (trigger) or into Elasticsearch side (JDBC plugins).

Microservices Integration Tests with Hoverfly and Testcontainers

Building good integration tests of a system consisting of several microservices may be quite a challenge. Today I’m going to show you how to use such tools like Hoverfly and Testcontainers to implement such the tests. I have already written about Hoverfly in my previous articles, as well as about Testcontainers. If you are interested in some intro to these framework you may take a look on the following articles:

• Testing REST API with Hoverfly
• Testing Spring Boot Integration with Vault and Postgres using Testcontainers Framework

Testing Spring Boot Integration with Vault and Postgres using Testcontainers Framework

I have already written many articles, where I was using Docker containers for running some third-party solutions integrated with my sample applications. Building integration tests for such applications may not be an easy task without Docker containers. Especially, if our application integrates with databases, message brokers or some other popular tools. If you are planning to build such integration tests you should definitely take a look on Testcontainers (https://www.testcontainers.org/). Testcontainers is a Java library that supports JUnit tests, providing fast and lightweight way for running instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container. It provides modules for the most popular relational and NoSQL databases like Postgres, MySQL, Cassandra or Neo4j. It also allows to run popular products like Elasticsearch, Kafka, Nginx or HashiCorp’s Vault. Today I’m going to show you more advanced sample of JUnit tests that use Testcontainers to check out an integration between Spring Boot/Spring Cloud application, Postgres database and Vault. For the purposes of that example we will use the case described in one of my previous articles Secure Spring Cloud Microservices with Vault and Nomad. Let us recall that use case.