So far, we have achieved externalizing configuration parameters as well as load balancing across many service instances.
Ribbon-based load balancing is sufficient for most of the microservices requirements. However, this approach falls short in a couple of scenarios:
If there is a large number of microservices, and if we want to optimize infrastructure utilization, we will have to dynamically change the number of service instances and the associated servers. It is not easy to predict and preconfigure the server URLs in a configuration file.
When targeting cloud deployments for highly scalable microservices, static registration and discovery is not a good solution considering the elastic nature of the cloud environment.
In the cloud deployment scenarios, IP addresses are not predictable, and will be difficult to statically configure in a file. We will have to update the configuration file every time there is a change in address.
The Ribbon approach partially...