Leader Only Spring Boot Starter

Introduction

Two weeks ago I released a library leader-only-spring-boot-starter. It leverages Apache Curator to restrict computation to a single application node. Underneath the library use LeaderLatch. All this is backed by Apache Zookeeper. If you want to use it, you need to have Zookeeper up & running. The library was created for applications that are developed with Spring Boot.

Usage

First of all you need to add dependency to your project. Copy right configuration for your build automation tool from here.

Then set up Zookeeper node by adding a property to Spring context.

curator-leadership:
    connection-string: localhost:2181

A connection string has the following pattern: IP1:PORT1,IP2:PORT2,...,IPN:PORTN. As you can see you can use many Zookeeper nodes.

You can also configure authentication, timeouts & retries. All available configuration options are described here.

The last step is to annotate a class and a method that you want to execute only on single application node.

@Leader("unique-identifier")
class Example {

    @LeaderOnly
    fun operationThatIsExecutableOnlyOnLeaderNode() {
        TODO("implement")
    }

    fun operationThatIsExecutableOnAllNodes() {
        TODO("implement")
    }
}

@Leader annotation extends @Component. It creates a new LeaderLatch instance. You can have many latches each with a unique identifier.

@LeaderOnly annotation indicates a method that will be executed on the selected leader node. Executing this method on nodes that weren’t selected for the leader will return null.

I hope you find it useful. If you want to see changes in this library feel free to add a pull request or create an issue.