Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

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Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)
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Let's get started with a Microservice Architecture with Spring Cloud:

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eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
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Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.

Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

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eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)
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Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Do JSON right with Jackson

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eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)
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Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

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eBook – Maven – NPI EA (cat = Maven)
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Get Started with Apache Maven:

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eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)
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Building a REST API with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

>> LEARN SPRING
Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)
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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

>> The New “REST With Spring Boot”

Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)
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Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.

I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

>> Learn Spring Security

Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)
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All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.

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Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
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Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:

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Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (cat=Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI (cat=Cloud/Spring Cloud)
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Let's get started with a Microservice Architecture with Spring Cloud:

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1. Introduction

Netflix Ribbon is an Inter Process Communication (IPC) cloud library. Ribbon primarily provides client-side load balancing algorithms.

Apart from the client-side load balancing algorithms, Ribbon provides also other features:

  • Service Discovery Integration – Ribbon load balancers provide service discovery in dynamic environments like a cloud. Integration with Eureka and Netflix service discovery component is included in the ribbon library
  • Fault Tolerance – the Ribbon API can dynamically determine whether the servers are up and running in a live environment and can detect those servers that are down
  • Configurable load-balancing rules – Ribbon supports RoundRobinRule, AvailabilityFilteringRule, WeightedResponseTimeRule out of the box and also supports defining custom rules

Ribbon API works based on the concept called “Named Client”. While configuring Ribbon in our application configuration file we provide a name for the list of servers included for the load balancing.

Let’s take it for a spin.

2. Dependency Management

The Netflix Ribbon API can be added to our project by adding the below dependency to our pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-ribbon</artifactId>
</dependency>

The latest libraries can be found here.

3. Example Application

In order to see the working of Ribbon API, we build a sample microservice application with Spring RestTemplate and we enhance it with Netflix Ribbon API along with Spring Cloud Netflix API.

We’ll use one of Ribbon’s load-balancing strategies, WeightedResponseTimeRule, to enable the client side load balancing between 2 servers, which are defined under a named client in the configuration file, in our application.

4. Ribbon Configuration

Ribbon API enables us to configure the following components of the load balancer:

  • Rule – Logic component which specifies the load balancing rule we are using in our application
  • Ping – A Component which specifies the mechanism we use to determine the server’s availability in real-time
  • ServerList – can be dynamic or static. In our case, we are using a static list of servers and hence we are defining them in the application configuration file directly

Let write a simple configuration for the library:

public class RibbonConfiguration {

    @Autowired
    IClientConfig ribbonClientConfig;

    @Bean
    public IPing ribbonPing(IClientConfig config) {
        return new PingUrl();
    }

    @Bean
    public IRule ribbonRule(IClientConfig config) {
        return new WeightedResponseTimeRule();
    }
}

Notice how we used the WeightedResponseTimeRule rule to determine the server and PingUrl mechanism to determine the server’s availability in real-time.

According to this rule, each server is given a weight according to its average response time, lesser the response time gives lesser the weight. This rule randomly selects a server where the possibility is determined by server’s weight.

And the PingUrl will ping every URL to determine the server’s availability.

5. application.yml

Below is the application.yml configuration file we created for this sample application:

spring:
  application:
    name: spring-cloud-ribbon

server:
  port: 8888

ping-server:
  ribbon:
    eureka:
      enabled: false
    listOfServers: localhost:9092,localhost:9999
    ServerListRefreshInterval: 15000

In the above file, we specified:

  • Application name
  • Port number of the application
  • Named client for the list of servers: “ping-server”
  • Disabled Eureka service discovery component, by setting eureka: enabled to false
  • Defined the list of servers available for load balancing, in this case, 2 servers
  • Configured the server refresh rate with ServerListRefreshInterval

6. RibbonClient

Let’s now set up the main application component snippet – where we use the RibbonClient to enable the load balancing instead of the plain RestTemplate:

@SpringBootApplication
@RestController
@RibbonClient(
  name = "ping-a-server",
  configuration = RibbonConfiguration.class)
public class ServerLocationApp {

    @Autowired
    RestTemplate restTemplate;

    @RequestMapping("/server-location")
    public String serverLocation() {
        return this.restTemplate.getForObject(
          "http://ping-server/locaus", String.class);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(ServerLocationApp.class, args);
    }
}

And here’s the RestTemplate configuration:

@Configuration
public class RestTemplateConfiguration{
    @LoadBalanced
    @Bean
    RestTemplate getRestTemplate() {
        return new RestTemplate();
    }
}

We defined a controller class with the annotation @RestController; we also annotated the class with @RibbonClient with a name and a configuration class.

The configuration class we defined here is the same class that we defined before in which we provided the desired Ribbon API configuration for this application.

Notice we annotated the RestTemplate with @LoadBalanced which suggests that we want this to be load balanced and in this case with Ribbon.

7. Failure Resiliency in Ribbon

As we discussed earlier in this article, Ribbon API not only provides client side load balancing algorithms but also it has built in failure resiliency.

As stated before, Ribbon API can determine the server’s availability through the constant pinging of servers at regular intervals and has a capability of skipping the servers which are not live.

In addition to that, it also implements Circuit Breaker pattern to filter out the servers based on specified criteria.

The Circuit Breaker pattern minimizes the impact of a server failure on performance by swiftly rejecting a request to that server that is failing without waiting for a time-out. We can disable this Circuit Breaker feature by setting the property niws.loadbalancer.availabilityFilteringRule.filterCircuitTripped to false.

When all servers are down, thus no server is available to serve the request, the pingUrl() will fail and we receive an exception java.lang.IllegalStateException with a message “No instances are available to serve the request”.

8. Conclusion

In this article, we discussed Netflix Ribbon API and its implementation in a simple sample application.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (All)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Partner – Microsoft – NPI (cat=Spring)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)
eBook – eBook Guide Spring Cloud – NPI (cat=Cloud/Spring Cloud)