Client Side Load Balancer: Ribbon

Ribbon is a client-side load balancer that gives you a lot of control over the behavior of HTTP and TCP clients. Feign already uses Ribbon, so, if you use @FeignClient, this section also applies.

A central concept in Ribbon is that of the named client. Each load balancer is part of an ensemble of components that work together to contact a remote server on demand, and the ensemble has a name that you give it as an application developer (for example, by using the @FeignClient annotation). On demand, Spring Cloud creates a new ensemble as an ApplicationContext for each named client by using RibbonClientConfiguration. This contains (amongst other things) an ILoadBalancer, a RestClient, and a ServerListFilter.