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>2.2.2</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

Copyright 2014 Netflix, Inc.

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?

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