Application Configuration Management(Deprecated):Simplify Spring Cloud micro-services environment configuration management with ACM

Environment attributes of configuration

During the continuous delivery of the system, the diversity and complexity of the system’s final running environment undoubtedly make it harder for us to manage configurations. Eugen Paraschiv briefly discussed this in his post Configuration Must Be Environment Specific. It is also elaborated in depth in the “Containerization, scheduling, and configuration management” section in Configuration management challenges in modern application architectures.

Due to the differences between the configurations of different environments, the artifacts of those environments are not consistent, and sometimes Docker can't deliver the "build once, run anywhere" experience as expected. Here are some simple examples to help you better understand.

• The logLevel should be set to DEBUG in the development environment, INFO in the staging environment, and WARNING in the production environment.
• The database runs on a 4-core 8 GB-RAM machine in the development environment, but on a 32-core 96 GB-RAM machine in the production environment.
• The maximum thread number in the execution thread pool of the daily environment should be set to 15, while this number should be larger in the production environment, which is 150 by default.
• In the online environment, application data sources in the Central Data Center need to connect to Database A, while application data sources in Shenzhen Data Center should connect to Database B due to the proximity.
• Two-way synchronization switch should be switched off only in and only in Mini Taobao environment.
• The new features should be made available only in the online Hangzhou Unit environment rather than other unit environments.

In this article we will briefly describe how to use Alibaba Cloud ACM in Spring Cloud to replace Spring Cloud Config in simplifying environment configuration management, and help you understand the ACM-based solutions to simplify micro-service environment configuration management. We will also list the pros and cons of ACM and Spring Cloud Config.

User stories

In daily engineering practice, we often picture a simple scenario with a user story to facilitate the elaboration and communication. This is an illustration used for preaching in the early stages:

Taking Movie Service as an example. Let's assume that we need to retrieve a list of all movies from the relational database MySQL(RDS). We only need the top-configuration machines for the production database, and we need to use different databases in the testing, pre-release, and production environments. Therefore, our applications need to have different data source configuration, connection pool configuration, database security configuration, and so on in different environments.

The following figure shows how to map different environments with ACM Namespace, and set different data source configurations for Movie Service in different running environments.

Create micro-service: movie service

• Create Spring Boot Starter micro-service: movie service

  Movie service’s business logic is very straightforward: to list all movies in MySQL(RDS):

  

  Here we created a standard JPA application (similar to the sample project on Spring official website Accessing data with MySQL). The project structure is as shown in the following figure:

  

• Introduce JPA, MySQL, connection pool HikariCP and WEB dependencies

  <dependency>
     <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
     <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
     <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
     <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
     <groupId>mysql</groupId>
     <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
     <scope>runtime</scope>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
     <groupId>com.zaxxer</groupId>
     <artifactId>HikariCP</artifactId>
     <version>2.7.6</version>
  </dependency>

• Create MySQL(RDS) database and users

  mysql> create database db_example; -- Create the new database
  mysql> create user 'springuser'@'localhost' identified by 'ThePassword'; -- Creates the user
  mysql> grant all on db_example.* to 'springuser'@'localhost'; -- Gives all the privileges to the new user on the newly created database

  For detailed steps, see the “Create the database” section in Accessing data with MySQL.

• Create a web Controller

  package com.alibaba.demo.microsvc.controller;
   import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
   import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
   import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody;
   import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;
   import com.alibaba.demo.microsvc.dao.MovieRepository;
   import com.alibaba.demo.microsvc.model.Movie;
   @RestController
   public class MovieController {
       @Autowired
       MovieRepository movieRepository;
       @RequestMapping("/list-movies")
       public @ResponseBody Iterable<Movie> listMovies() {
             return movieRepository.findAll();
       }    
  }

Use Namespace in ACM to create isolated environment configuration

• Create three environments in ACM: dev, stage, and prod

  

• Create configuration respectively for dev, stage, and prod environments

  

In the previous step, we set different values for the same configuration item in different environments. Taking the spring.datasource.url configuration item as an example, we connect different databases to different environments by setting different URLs, and only enables SSL (useSSL=true) in the production environment.

dev:
    spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/db_example? useSSL=false
prod:
    spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://30.5.101.169:3306/db_example? useSSL=true

In addition, we have set a larger database connection pool and a smaller timeout value for the prod environment.

dev:
    spring.datasource.hikari.connection-timeout=60000
    spring.datasource.hikari.maximum-pool-size=10
prod:
    spring.datasource.hikari.connection-timeout=15000
    spring.datasource.hikari.maximum-pool-size=200

To make it easier to debug, we only enables SQL Trace in the dev environment.

dev:
    spring.jpa.show-sql=true

Integrate Movie Service with ACM

Next, we integrate Movie Service with ACM to obtain the corresponding environment configuration from ACM. For instructions on how to use ACM in Spring Cloud, see Spring Cloud ACM.

• Introduce ACM dependencies to Movie Service

  <dependency>
     <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId>
     <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-acm</artifactId>
     <version>1.0.1</version>
  </dependency>

• Configure ACM connection information, namespace, accessKey, secretKey, and other information in application.properties

  spring.application.name=movie-service
  spring.application.group=com.alibaba.cloud.acm
  alibaba.acm.endpoint=acm.aliyun.com
  alibaba.acm.namespace=<your_namespace_id>
  alibaba.acm.accessKey=<your_ak>        
  alibaba.acm.secretKey=<your_sk>

Note

You can find your namespace_id, accessKey, secretKey, and other information in “namespace details” or “code example of configuration”.

Access Movie Service from your browser

View pushing and refreshing history of ACM configurations

If spring-boot-starter-actuator dependency has been introduced to Movie Service, and management.security.enabled=false is set in application.properties, you can view the application’s configuration consumption and refreshing history from endpoint http://<<ip:port>>/acm.

You can also view the configuration’s push track, configuration version, and other information from the ACM console. For instructions, see ACM documentation.

Brief comparison between ACM and Spring Cloud Config

Download project

Sample project used in this article can be downloaded from movie-service.tar.gz.

This project has passed the test in the following environments:

• Spring Cloud Edgware.RELEASE
• Spring Boot 1.5.9. RELEASE
• HikariCP 2.7.6
• MySQL 5.7.11
• ACM 4.2.0
• ACM Spring Cloud SDK 1.0.1