FAQ

What happens during network outages between Peers?

In the case of network outages between peers, following things may happen.

The heartbeat replications between peers may fail and the server detects this situation and enters into a self-preservation mode protecting the current state. Registrations may happen in an orphaned server and some clients may reflect new registrations while the others may not. The situation autocorrects itself after the network connectivity is restored to a stable state. When the peers are able to communicate fine, the registration information is automatically transferred to the servers that do not have them. The bottom line is, during the network outages, the server tries to be as resilient as possible, but there is a possibility of clients having different views of the servers during that time.

Why not use HA proxy for load balancing?

In AWS cloud, instances come in and go out of traffic for its inherent reasons. ASGs could expand the instances or destroy them depending on traffic. The challenge here whether we use HAProxy or not, is to handle this dynamic nature. Even when you use HAProxy, it needs to be educated about the instances that come in and go out, which is exactly what Eureka does.

One of the reasons why I could think of using proxy in the middle-tier is when you need sticky sessions. If that is a requirement, HAProxy could complement Eureka. But, since most of the mid-tier services are non-sticky in our scenario, we don't have a reason to go through a proxy there by avoiding a network hop. Another positive side effect of this is, it makes our clients fairly resilient to Eureka server outages, since the client has all the information to contact the services it needs to talk to. Going through HA Proxy has a disadvantage in that, you cannot be resilient to proxy outages.

Why not use Curator/Zookeeper as a service registry?

There are some overlaps in certain areas of what Zookeeper and Eureka provide especially in the areas of replicating registry information. Eureka could use zookeeper to cache registry information and replicate the same, but replication is just a small part of what Eureka provides.

Eureka deals with various other things apart from replication:

• REST end points that deal with registrations, renewals, expirations and cancels.
• Keeping the instance information up-to-date dealing with the intricacies of EIP binding, deployment rollbacks, autoscaling in a resilient manner.
• Being resilient to network outages between clients and servers and between peers.

Zookeeper's power comes to the fore with leader election, ordered updates, distributed synchronization along with its consistency guarantees (quorums).

None of the above except the replication registry really applies to Eureka to justify an other dependency that we have to deal with the following complications:

• You will have to now find a way to assign EIPs to zookeeper similar to Eureka.
• Deal with failures when zookeeper fails.

And further more, Eureka has been built carefully without any hard dependency on any external components .

• Most services rely on Eureka to bootstrap themselves.
• To reduce the complexity.
• Avoid another failure point.