Spring WebClient as a Load Balancer Client

You can configure WebClient to automatically use a load-balancer client. To create a load-balanced WebClient, create a WebClient.Builder @Bean and use the @LoadBalanced qualifier, as follows:

@Configuration
public class MyConfiguration {

	@Bean
	@LoadBalanced
	public WebClient.Builder loadBalancedWebClientBuilder() {
		return WebClient.builder();
	}
}

public class MyClass {
    @Autowired
    private WebClient.Builder webClientBuilder;

    public Mono<String> doOtherStuff() {
        return webClientBuilder.build().get().uri("http://stores/stores")
        				.retrieve().bodyToMono(String.class);
    }
}

The URI needs to use a virtual host name (that is, a service name, not a host name). The Ribbon client or Spring Cloud LoadBalancer is used to create a full physical address.

If you want to use a @LoadBalanced WebClient.Builder, you need to have a load balancer implementation in the classpath. We recommend that you add the Spring Cloud LoadBalancer starter to your project. Then, ReactiveLoadBalancer is used underneath. Alternatively, this functionality also works with spring-cloud-starter-netflix-ribbon, but the request is handled by a non-reactive LoadBalancerClient under the hood. Additionally, spring-cloud-starter-netflix-ribbon is already in maintenance mode, so we do not recommend adding it to new projects. If you have both spring-cloud-starter-loadbalancer and spring-cloud-starter-netflix-ribbon in your classpath, Ribbon is used by default. To switch to Spring Cloud LoadBalancer, set the spring.cloud.loadbalancer.ribbon.enabled property to false.

Retrying Failed Requests

A load-balanced RestTemplate can be configured to retry failed requests. By default, this logic is disabled. You can enable it by adding Spring Retry to your application’s classpath. The load-balanced RestTemplate honors some of the Ribbon configuration values related to retrying failed requests. You can use client.ribbon.MaxAutoRetries, client.ribbon.MaxAutoRetriesNextServer, and client.ribbon.OkToRetryOnAllOperations properties. If you would like to disable the retry logic with Spring Retry on the classpath, you can set spring.cloud.loadbalancer.retry.enabled=false. See the Ribbon documentation for a description of what these properties do.

If you would like to implement a BackOffPolicy in your retries, you need to create a bean of type LoadBalancedRetryFactory and override the createBackOffPolicy method:

@Configuration
public class MyConfiguration {
    @Bean
    LoadBalancedRetryFactory retryFactory() {
        return new LoadBalancedRetryFactory() {
            @Override
            public BackOffPolicy createBackOffPolicy(String service) {
        		return new ExponentialBackOffPolicy();
        	}
        };
    }
}
client in the preceding examples should be replaced with your Ribbon client’s name.

If you want to add one or more RetryListener implementations to your retry functionality, you need to create a bean of type LoadBalancedRetryListenerFactory and return the RetryListener array you would like to use for a given service, as the following example shows:

@Configuration
public class MyConfiguration {
    @Bean
    LoadBalancedRetryListenerFactory retryListenerFactory() {
        return new LoadBalancedRetryListenerFactory() {
            @Override
            public RetryListener[] createRetryListeners(String service) {
                return new RetryListener[]{new RetryListener() {
                    @Override
                    public <T, E extends Throwable> boolean open(RetryContext context, RetryCallback<T, E> callback) {
                        //TODO Do you business...
                        return true;
                    }

                    @Override
                     public <T, E extends Throwable> void close(RetryContext context, RetryCallback<T, E> callback, Throwable throwable) {
                        //TODO Do you business...
                    }

                    @Override
                    public <T, E extends Throwable> void onError(RetryContext context, RetryCallback<T, E> callback, Throwable throwable) {
                        //TODO Do you business...
                    }
                }};
            }
        };
    }
}