We have Spring Boot services running in Kubernetes and are using the Spring Cloud Kubernetes Load Balancer functionality with RestTemplate to make calls to other Spring Boot services. One of the main reasons we have this in place is historical - in that previously we ran our services in EC2 using Eureka for service discovery and after the migration we kept the Spring discovery client/client-side load balancing in place (updating dependencies etc for it to work with the Spring Cloud Kubernetes project)
We have a problem that when one of the target pods goes down we get multiple failures for requests for a period of time with java.net.NoRouteToHostException
ie the spring load balancer is still trying to send to that pod.
So I have a few questions on this:
Shouldn't the target instance get removed automatically when this happens? So it might happen once but after that, the target pod list will be repaired?
Or if not is there some other configuration we need to add to handle this - eg retry / circuit breaker, etc?
A more general question is what benefit does Spring's client-side load balancing bring with Kubernetes? Without it, our service would still be able to call other services using Kubernetes built-in service / load-balancing functionality and this should handle the issue of pods going down automatically. The Spring documentation also talks about being able to switch from POD mode to SERVICE mode (https://docs.spring.io/spring-cloud-kubernetes/docs/current/reference/html/index.html#loadbalancer-for-kubernetes). But isn't this service mode just what Kubernetes does automatically? I'm wondering if the simplest solution here isn't to remove the Spring Load Balancer altogether? What would we lose then?