Light Proxy

All the services developed on top of Light-4J frameworks support client side service discovery, load balance, and cluster natively. So there is no need to put a reverse proxy instance in front of our services like other API frameworks that support only server side service discovery.

Light services also embed a distributed gateway to address all the cross-cutting concerns in the request/response chain and work with the ecosystem that consists:

Currently, we only support Java; however, we are planning to support Nodejs, Rust, and Go in the future if there is enough customer demand. Some of our customers have some existing RESTful APIs built on top of other Java frameworks or other languages. We have frequently been asked how to interact with these services to/from light services and enable security, metrics, logging, tracing, discovery, validation, sanitization, etc. on the existing services.

Our answer is to deploy a reverse proxy built on top of the light-4j framework that wraps the existing service.

The reverse proxy has the following features:

  • High throughput, low latency, and small footprint.
  • Integrates light-oauth2 to protect un-secured services
  • Built-in load balancer with multiple data centers and clouds support
  • Can be started with Docker or standalone
  • Supports HTTP 2.0 protocol on both in/out connections
  • TLS termination
  • Allows adding other handlers—for example, TableauAuthHandler.
  • Supports REST, GraphQL and RPC style of APIs
  • Centralized logging with ELK, TraceabilityId, and CorrelationId
  • OpenTracing with Jaeger tracer integration
  • Collects client and service metrics into InfluxDB or Prometheus and view the dashboard on Grafana
  • Service registry and discovery with Portal Registry or Consul
  • Manages configuration with light-config-server

To learn how to use this proxy, please refer to

Proxy Benchmark with Consistent Throughput

In the benchmark with maximum throughput, our focus is the max throughput with wrk; however, most customers won’t need millions of requests per second. Some users are more interested in the performance of light-proxy with consistent volume. The wrk is not the tool to generate consistent volumes, so we have to find another tool. We will try wrk2 and JMeter for the tests to cross-verify the results from two different tools. Read More »

Proxy Benchmark

We know the light-proxy is based on the light-4j, which is designed for high throughput, low latency and small memory footprint; however, we still want to have the real performance numbers when using it with the backend APIs. There are several questions that we want to answer: What is the baseline performance for the backend API? What is the performance when adding the proxy in front of the backend API? What is the overhead of each middleware handler in the proxy? Read More »

SideCar

One of the main features for light-4j frameworks is separating the cross-cutting concerns from the business logic so that developers can focus on the business API handler implementations and DevOps can focus on the cross-cutting concerns in the pipeline for deployment. All cross-cutting concerns are implemented as middleware handlers that can be plugged into the HTTP request/response chain. All of them group together to form a flexible gateway to protect the API handler implementations. Read More »

Body Validation

As we know, you can plug in over 100 middleware handlers from Light in the light-proxy to customize it for your needs. One of the features most users are interested in is the schema validation on the proxy. For example, when you have the OpenAPI 3.0 specification for the backend service, you can deploy the openapi.yaml to the proxy and wire in the openapi-validator to perform the validation against the specification. Read More »

Tableau Authentication Handler

The light-proxy is used to bring legacy APIs to the light ecosystem by providing cross-cutting concerns on the network level. One of the cross-cutting concerns is the security with JWT verification. It helps to protect the downstream API which doesn’t support OAuth 2.0 with JWT access token; however, most APIs do have some security mechanisms to authenticate and authorize access. Some of them even have customized security with its login API and customized token like Tableau. Read More »

Proxy Artifact

When considering using light-proxy to wrap your existing API, you have two options for deployment artifacts. With each of the following options, you have to provide config files and pass them as a directory to the light-proxy. Docker The docker image can be found at https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/networknt/light-proxy/tags docker pull networknt/light-proxy:latest Fatjar You can download the fat jar from maven central with all the dependencies included. Source Code It makes sense for enterprise users to fork the source code repository and add their customized handlers to make the light-proxy suitable to be the sidecar container in front of all the back-end APIs to handle cross-cutting concerns on the network level. Read More »

Proxy Configuration

The light-proxy is a RESTful proxy server that provides a lot of features other proxy servers cannot offer. This document will explain all use cases and map to certain configurations to deploy the proxy server based on the requirements. proxy.yml Here is an example of proxy.yml # Reverse Proxy Handler Configuration# If HTTP 2.0 protocol will be used to connect to target servershttp2Enabled:true# If TLS is enabled when connecting to the target servershttpsEnabled:true# Target URIshosts:https://localhost:8081,https://localhost:8082,https://localhost:8083# Connections per thread to the target serversconnectionsPerThread:20# Max request time in milliseconds before timeoutmaxRequestTime:1000# Rewrite Host Header with the target host and port and write X_FORWARDED_HOST with original hostrewriteHostHeader:true# Reuse XForwarded for the target XForwarded headerreuseXForwarded:false# Max Connection RetriesmaxConnectionRetries:3Load Balance To enable load balance to multiple backend service instances, you need to config proxy. Read More »