Show List
Tutorials > Spring Cloud > Load Balancing with Ribbon

Load Balancing with Ribbon

Spring Cloud Ribbon is a load balancing library for the Spring Cloud platform. It provides a client-side load balancing solution for inter-service communication in a microservices architecture.

Ribbon uses Netflix’s Load Balancer to perform client-side load balancing of requests to multiple instances of a service. The client application communicates with a list of available service instances and distributes requests across these instances using a load balancing algorithm such as round-robin, least connections, and so on.

This way, Ribbon helps to distribute the load across multiple instances of a service, improving the reliability and scalability of the overall system. It also offers the ability to configure different load balancing policies and failover strategies, enabling the application to handle failures and perform optimally under different conditions.

In Spring Cloud, Ribbon can be easily integrated with other components of the platform, such as Feign, Zuul, and Eureka, to provide a complete solution for inter-service communication in a microservices architecture.


Here's a code sample in Java to demonstrate Load Balancing with Ribbon in Spring Cloud:
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Service;
import org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate;

import com.netflix.hystrix.contrib.javanica.annotation.HystrixCommand;

@Service
public class LoadBalancedRestTemplateService {

    private final RestTemplate restTemplate;

    @Autowired
    public LoadBalancedRestTemplateService(RestTemplate restTemplate) {
        this.restTemplate = restTemplate;
    }

    @HystrixCommand(fallbackMethod = "defaultResponse")
    public String getData() {
        return restTemplate.getForObject("http://example-service/data", String.class);
    }

    public String defaultResponse() {
        return "Fallback Response";
    }
}
In this example, RestTemplate is annotated with @LoadBalanced to indicate that it should use a load balancer. The load balancing logic is implemented by Ribbon. The @HystrixCommand annotation is used to add a fallback method, which will be called if the request fails.


Next: Circuit Breaker with Hystrix

    Leave a Comment

  • captcha text