The guys at Netflix have developed and open sourced (among many other things) Feign and Ribbon. These libraries can help you as a developer to build robust, fault-tolerant service integrations. Best of all, they've been tested in the wild by Netflix, who use both libraries extensively in their own microservices architecture. In this post, we'll look at Feign and Ribbon to see how they can be used in the context of a Spring Boot application.
What Is Feign?
Feign is a library that helps developers create declarative HTTP clients by simply defining an interface and annotating it. At runtime, Feign creates the HTTP client implementation for the interface. We'll look at this in detail with some sample code later.