Netflix open sources Zuul 2 cloud gateway

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Netflix in their tech blog announced that their popular cloud gateway Zuul 2 is now open-source. Zuul 2 was announced back in 2016 is Netflix’s Java-based API gateway that handles all the request for Netflix’s user base. Zuul 2 is the front door, acting as a filter to any request that comes into the Netflix’s server. This gateway monitors the request and routes the request to the appropriate service to then act on the request. Zuul, in a way, is responsible for keeping Netflix standing strong and fulfilling your streaming requests.

Netflix is known for open sourcing a lot of the tools developed in-house for the community. Zuul 2 is a battle-tested tool as it has been handling the massive Netflix infrastructure. Since its open sourcing, the developers have an option of a more resilient tool that can be used in their infrastructure architecture. Netflix promises to keep the security aspect intact for the open source Zuul 2. Also to add to this news, Netflix announced some more features for Zuul 2.

Here are the feature additions:

Server protocols: Zuul 2 has full support for HTTP/2 connections. Also, Mutual TLS will enhance Zuul’s operation in secure infrastructure.
Resiliency features: To increase the availability, Netflix will be adding a feature called Adaptive Retries that is used on Netflix. Also, it would be adding configurable concurrency limits for protecting the origins from getting overloaded and separating the other origins that run behind Zuul.
Request Passport: This feature will enable the Zuul server to track all events that occur for each request. This will allow you to compute the asynchronous requests for better availability of your services.
Status Categories: This feature helps you categorize the requests by extending the success and failure state in terms of HTTP status code.
Request attempts: It tracks all the proxy attempts and provides you the status of each attempt. This really helps to identify the retries and to debug the routing.
Zuul also has enhanced self-service routing, load balancing, anomaly detection, among other primary features that Netflix uses to keep the infrastructure secure and running.

Netflix has released several other tools including Titus (container management), Conductor (microservice orchestration), Hystrix (cloud management), Vizceral (traffic management), among other efficient tools that can be used in large infrastructures.

You can read Netflix’s announcement blog to get more insights on the future development in Zuul 2.