Zuul is an edge service that provides dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, security, and more.
Zuul is the front door for all requests from devices and web sites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application.
As an edge service application, Zuul is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency and security, and more. It also has the ability to route requests to multiple Amazon Auto Scaling Groups as appropriate.
Zuul uses a range of different types of filters that enables us to quickly and nimbly apply functionality to our edge service. These filters help us perform the following functions:
- Authentication and Security - identifying authentication requirements for each resource and rejecting requests that do not satisfy them.
- Insights and Monitoring - tracking meaningful data and statistics at the edge in order to give us an accurate view of production.
- Dynamic Routing - dynamically routing requests to different backend clusters as needed.
- Stress Testing - gradually increasing the traffic to a cluster in order to gauge performance.
- Load Shedding - allocating capacity for each type of request and dropping requests that go over the limit.
- Static Response handling - building some responses directly at the edge instead of forwarding them to an internal cluster
- Multiregion Resiliency - routing requests across AWS regions in order to diversify our ELB usage and move our edge closer to our members
References:
- GitHub Repository
- Wiki (for usage, information, HOWTO, etc.)
- Announcing Zuul: Edge Service in the Cloud
