Topology

When building systems of many microservices, being able to locate, discovery and interact with them in an ever-changing deployment environment can become a challenge. There are many solutions to managing a topology of services, each with this own trade-offs.

In a pure WildFly scenario, in an environment where multicast is available, many users rely upon JGroups to handle discovery and reliable communications between nodes. In other scenarios, either due to the lack of multicast, heterogenuity of services, or scaling concerns, different service-discovery mechanisms are used. These may include services such as Apache Zookeeper or Hashicorp’s Consul.

WildFly Swarm attempts to abstract away the many ways of handling service registration and discovery through its topology fraction. The topology fraction only provides the abstractions and APIs. It must work in concert with other specific implementations to actually provide information about the layout of your concrete services.

At the moment, two topology implementations are available:

  • JGroups

  • Consul

Additionally, regardless of the topology implementation selected, WildFly Swarm provides a topology-webapp which helps bring the topology abstraction to your Javascript-centric applications running in the browser.

General Usage

Advertising Services

When using topology in your application, your various archives can be turned into a TopologyArchive and subsequently advertise() themselves under a variety of names. By default, a no-arg version of advertise() will advertise the deployed service using the base name of the archive.

JAXRSArchive deployment = ShrinkWrap.create(JAXRSArchive.class, "events.war");

// advertise this deployment as `events`
deployment.as(TopologyArchive.class).advertise();

Additionally, archives can advertise different names, especially in the case where you do not provide a name when creating the archive.

JAXRSArchive deployment = ShrinkWrap.create(JAXRSArchive.class);

// advertise this deployment as `events`
deployment.as(TopologyArchive.class).advertise("events");

Accessing Topology Information inside a WildFly Swarm Application

The Topology is made available through JNDI, and provides a simple method for performing the retrieval of it from within your running application.

Topology topology = Topology.lookup();

Once retrieved, your application and add or remove a TopologyListener in order to be informed about changes in the topology as services start and stop.

Additionally, the Topology class provides an asMap() method which returns the full current topology in a Map where the keys are the service names, and the values are a list of Topology.Entry items, providing access to the host and port.