Eclipse Vert.

x
Chapter 04
Message Based Microservices
Firmansyah.profess@gmail.com
2018
00. HTTP Main Issues
a. Reactive Microservices must be:
• Autonomous
• Asynchronous
• Resilient
• Elastic
b. HTTP based microservices as demonstrated on chapter 03 is not
Reactive Microservices, because it does not provide the resilience and
elasticity.
c. It does not provide the resilience, because if the first microservice
(HttpMicro01 class) fails, we won’t be able to recover by calling
another one.
d. It does not provide the elasticity, if we are under load, creating a new
instance of the HttpMicro01 won’t help us, because HttpMicro02 is
configured to target the HttpMicro01 microservice explicitly.
e. HTTP based microservices can be Reactive Microservices if we
provide some infrastructure to route virtual URLs to a set of service
and a load-balancing strategy to provide elasticity and
health-check support to improve resilience.
00. Message Based MSA
a. The Vert.x Event Bus is messaging backbone for creating Message
Based Microservices Architecture (MSA) that allowing the different
components of an application to interact using messages.
b. Messages are sent to addresses and have a set of headers and a body.
An address is an opaque string representing a destination. Message
consumers register themselves to addresses to receive the messages.
c. The Vert.x Event Bus is also clustered, meaning it can dispatch
messages over the network between distributed senders and
consumers. nodes are connected to enable shared data structure, hard-
stop failure detection, and load-balancing group communication.
d. The Vert.x Event Bus provides three types of delivery semantics:
1. The send method: allows a component to send a message to an
address. If more than one consumer is registered on this address,
Vert.x applies a round-robin strategy to select a consumer.
2. The publish method to deliver the message to all consumers
registered on the address.
3. The send method with a reply handler. This request/
response mechanism allows implementing message-based
asynchronous.
00. Sequence Diagram
We will create two verticle classes with following
sequence diagram to demonstrate Message
based Microservices

MsgMicro02 MsgMicro01

HTTP Request
Address: “AdrMsg”, Message:”Firmansyah”

Address: “AdrMsg”, Message:”Indonesia”

Reply: “hello Firmansyah”

Reply: “hello Indonesia”

HTTP Response
01. Create MsgMicro01 Class
a. Create a directory called “chapter04”
b. Generate the project structure using maven
inside chapter04 folder:
mvn io.fabric8:vertx-maven-plugin:1.0.5:setup \
-DprojectGroupId=io.vertx.chapter04 \
-DprojectArtifactId=msg-micro01-vertx-app \
-Dverticle=io.vertx.chapter04.MsgMicro01 \
-Ddependencies=infinispan
This command generates:
1. The Maven project structure,
2. Configures the vertx-maven-plugin, and
3. Creates a verticle class (io.vertx.chapter04.MsgMicro01),
4. Adds the Infinispan dependency, an in-memory data grid that will
be used to manage the cluster. Once generated, we may
need to configure Infinispan to build the cluster. The
default configuration uses multicast to discover the nodes.
01. Create MsgMicro01 Class
c. Modify io.vertx.chapter04.MsgMicro01 Class
1. Update start() method :

@Override
public void start() {
// Receive message from the address 'AdrMsg'
vertx.eventBus().<String>consumer("AdrMsg", message -> {
JsonObject json = new JsonObject()
.put("served-by", this.toString());
// Check whether we have received a payload in the
// incoming message
if (message.body().isEmpty()) {
message.reply(json.put("message", "hello"));
} else {
message.reply(json.put("message",
"hello " + message.body()));
}
});
}
01. Create MsgMicro01 Class
Notes:
• This code retrieves the eventBus from the vertx object and
registers a consumer on the address 'AdrMsg'. When a
message is received, it replies to it. Depending on whether or not
the incoming message has an empty body, we compute a
different response. As in the example in the previous chapter, we
send a JSON object back.
• We added the served-by entry in the JSON for knowing from
which instance of MsgMicro01 class will reply the message if we
clustered MsgMicro01 class.

d. Run the MsgMicro01 Class:

mvn compile vertx:run \
-Dvertx.runArgs="-cluster -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true"

The -cluster tells Vert.x to start in cluster mode.

02. Create MsgMicro02 Class
a. Create a directory called “consumer” inside
chapter04 folder
b. Generate the new project structure using
maven inside consumer folder:
mvn io.fabric8:vertx-maven-plugin:1.0.5:setup \
-DprojectGroupId=io.vertx.chapter04 \
-DprojectArtifactId=msg-micro02-vertx-app \
-Dverticle= io.vertx.chapter04.MsgMicro02 \
-Ddependencies=infinispan,rx
02. Create MsgMicro02 Class
c. Modify io.vertx.chapter04.MsgMicro02 inside
the start method with following logic:
1. Use the event bus to send a message to the 'AdrMsg‘
address and extract the body of the reply.
2. Use the zip operation to retrieve the two responses and build
the final result.
3. In the subscribe method, we print the final result to the console
or print the stack trace.
4. Add an HTTP server, when an HTTP request is received, we
send a message to the 'AdrMsg‘ twice and return the built
result as a HTTP response.
d. Run the MsgMicro02 Class:
mvn compile vertx:run \
-Dvertx.runArgs="-cluster -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true"

e. Browse URL http://localhost:8082/ and

look at the application output.
03. Elasticity Demo
a. Use Ctrl + C to shut down all the application.
b. Package MsgMicro01 app as a fat jar file
mvn clean package
c. Open two different terminals in the chapter04
directory and issue the following command (in
each terminal):
java -jar target/msg-micro01-vertx-app-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar --
cluster -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
d. Package MsgMicro02 app as a fat jar file
mvn clean package
e. Open a terminal in the consumer directory and
issue the following command
java -jar target/msg-micro02-vertx-app-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar --
cluster -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
f. Browse URL http://localhost:8082/ and
look at the application output.
03. Elasticity Demo Notes
a. Elasticity can be achieved more easily using message
microservices compare to HTTP microservices,
especially using Vertx Tool.
b. HTTP microservices is not enforcing elasticity,
because the HTTP microservice was targeting a
specific instance of the microservice using a hard-
coded URL (IP Address and Port).
c. The two instances of MsgMicro01 are used. The Vert.x
cluster connects two instances, and the event bus is
clustered. Thanks to the event bus round-robin, the
Vert.x event bus dispatches messages to the available
instances and thus balances the load among the
different instances listening to the same address.
d. So, by using the event bus, we have the elasticity
characteristic we need.
04. Resilience Demo
a. Use Ctrl + C to shut down all the application.
b. Modify start() method on
io.vertx.chapter04.MsgMicro01 Class
c. Modify start() method on
io.vertx.chapter04.MsgMicro02 Class
d. Launch MsgMicro01 app in the chapter04 directory
using following command:
mvn compile vertx:run -Dvertx.runArgs="-cluster -
Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true"
e. Launch MsgMicro02 app in the consumer directory
using following command:
mvn compile vertx:run -Dvertx.runArgs="-cluster -
Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true"
04. Resilience Demo Notes
a. Even though the system get failure or / and don't get
the response, we don’t crash, we don’t limit our
scalability, and we can still handle requests.
b. We implement retry to retrieve the value if it gets a
failure in the form of a timeout or an explicit failure.
c. We implement timeout to improve the user
experience, we should always reply in a timely fashion
to the user, even if we don’t receive the responses
from the service.
d. Now we can reload the page and will always get a
result, even if there are failures or timeouts.
Remember that the thread is not blocked while calling
the service, so we can always accept new requests
and respond to them in a timely fashion.
e. However, this timeout retry often causes more harm
than good, as we will see in the next chapter.
Thank You!
Any questions? You can find me at
firmansyah.profess@gmail.com

Credits
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