Ribbon

Ribbon is a client side IPC library that is battle-tested in cloud. It provides the following features

Load balancing
Fault tolerance
Multiple protocol (HTTP, TCP, UDP) support in an asynchronous and reactive model
Caching and batching

To get ribbon binaries, go to maven central. Here is an example to add dependency in Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.netflix.ribbon</groupId>
    <artifactId>ribbon</artifactId>
    <version>2.0-RC1</version>
</dependency>

Modules

ribbon: APIs that integrate load balancing, fault tolerance, caching/batching on top of other ribbon modules and Hystrix
ribbon-loadbalancer: Load balancer APIs that can be used independently or with other modules
ribbon-eureka: APIs using Eureka client to provide dynamic server list for cloud
ribbon-transport: Transport clients that support HTTP, TCP and UDP protocols using RxNetty with load balancing capability
ribbon-httpclient: REST client built on top of Apache HttpClient integrated with load balancers (deprecated and being replaced by ribbon module)
ribbon-example: Examples
ribbon-core: Client configuration APIs and other shared APIs

Project Status: On Maintenance

Ribbon comprises of multiple components some of which are used in production internally and some of which were replaced by non-OSS solutions over time. This is because Netflix started moving into a more componentized architecture for RPC with a focus on single-responsibility modules. So each Ribbon component gets a different level of attention at this moment.

More specifically, here are the components of Ribbon and their level of attention by our teams:

ribbon-core: deployed at scale in production
ribbon-eureka: deployed at scale in production
ribbon-evcache: not used
ribbon-guice: not used
ribbon-httpclient: we use everything not under com.netflix.http4.ssl. Instead, we use an internal solution developed by our cloud security team
ribbon-loadbalancer: deployed at scale in production
ribbon-test: this is just an internal integration test suite
ribbon-transport: not used
ribbon: not used

Even for the components deployed in production we have wrapped them in a Netflix internal http client and we are not adding new functionality since they’ve been stable for a while. Any new functionality has been added to internal wrappers on top of Ribbon (such as request tracing and metrics). We have not made an effort to make those components Netflix-agnostic under Ribbon.

Recognizing these realities and deficiencies, we are placing Ribbon in maintenance mode. This means that if an external user submits a large feature request, internally we wouldn’t prioritize it highly. However, if someone were to do work on their own and submit complete pull requests, we’d be happy to review and accept. Our team has instead started building an RPC solution on top of gRPC. We are doing this transition for two main reasons: multi-language support and better extensibility/composability through request interceptors. That’s our current plan moving forward.

We currently contribute to the gRPC code base regularly. To help our teams migrate to a gRPC-based solution in production (and battle-test it), we are also adding load-balancing and discovery interceptors to achieve feature parity with the functionality Ribbon and Eureka provide. The interceptors are Netflix-internal at the moment. When we reach that level of confidence we hope to open-source this new approach. We don’t expect this to happen before Q3 of 2016.

Release notes

See https://github.com/Netflix/ribbon/releases

Code example

Access HTTP resource using template (full example)

HttpResourceGroup httpResourceGroup = Ribbon.createHttpResourceGroup("movieServiceClient",
            ClientOptions.create()
                    .withMaxAutoRetriesNextServer(3)
                    .withConfigurationBasedServerList("localhost:8080,localhost:8088"));
HttpRequestTemplate<ByteBuf> recommendationsByUserIdTemplate = httpResourceGroup.newTemplateBuilder("recommendationsByUserId", ByteBuf.class)
            .withMethod("GET")
            .withUriTemplate("/users/{userId}/recommendations")
            .withFallbackProvider(new RecommendationServiceFallbackHandler())
            .withResponseValidator(new RecommendationServiceResponseValidator())
            .build();
Observable<ByteBuf> result = recommendationsByUserIdTemplate.requestBuilder()
                        .withRequestProperty("userId", “user1")
                        .build()
                        .observe();

Access HTTP resource using annotations (full example)

public interface MovieService {
    @Http(
            method = HttpMethod.GET,
            uri = "/users/{userId}/recommendations",
            )
    RibbonRequest<ByteBuf> recommendationsByUserId(@Var("userId") String userId);
}

MovieService movieService = Ribbon.from(MovieService.class);
Observable<ByteBuf> result = movieService.recommendationsByUserId("user1").observe();

Create an AWS-ready load balancer with Eureka dynamic server list and zone affinity enabled

        IRule rule = new AvailabilityFilteringRule();
        ServerList<DiscoveryEnabledServer> list = new DiscoveryEnabledNIWSServerList("MyVIP:7001");
        ServerListFilter<DiscoveryEnabledServer> filter = new ZoneAffinityServerListFilter<DiscoveryEnabledServer>();
        ZoneAwareLoadBalancer<DiscoveryEnabledServer> lb = LoadBalancerBuilder.<DiscoveryEnabledServer>newBuilder()
                .withDynamicServerList(list)
                .withRule(rule)
                .withServerListFilter(filter)
                .buildDynamicServerListLoadBalancer();   
        DiscoveryEnabledServer server = lb.chooseServer();

Use LoadBalancerCommand to load balancing IPC calls made by HttpURLConnection (full example)

CommandBuilder.<String>newBuilder()
        .withLoadBalancer(LoadBalancerBuilder.newBuilder().buildFixedServerListLoadBalancer(serverList))
        .build(new LoadBalancerExecutable<String>() {
            @Override
            public String run(Server server) throws Exception {
                URL url = new URL("http://" + server.getHost() + ":" + server.getPort() + path);
                HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
                return conn.getResponseMessage();
            }
        }).execute();

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Questions?

Email ribbon-users@googlegroups.com or join us

jensg/ribbon