Communicating between microservices

Every microservice has an internal endpoint at which other microservices can reach it. The internal URL is typically of the structure: http://<microservice-name>.<namespace>. This microservice discovery is powered by Kubernetes’s internal DNS.

Examples:

  1. Hasura data API: http://data.hasura
  2. Custom webapp called my-app: http://my-app.default

This is because Hasura microservices run in the hasura namespace and custom microservices run in the default namespace.

Also every microservice expects a X-Hasura-User-Id and X-Hasura-Role header to be passed with the request for authentication. The X-Hasura-Role can be set to anonymous or admin depending on the service’s access permissions. The X-Hasura-User-Id can be set to 0.

In fact, when a microservice is exposed externally on a route, the API gateway proxies the request to the internal URL of the microservice while setting the X-Hasura-User-Id and X-Hasura-Role headers based on the user session token passed.

To get the URLs of externally exposed microservices running on a Hasura cluster, run:

$ hasura microservice list
• Getting microservices...
• Custom microservices:
NAME      STATUS    INTERNAL-URL      EXTERNAL-URL
my-app    Running   my-app.default    http://my-app.gram29.hasura-app.io

• Hasura microservices:
NAME            STATUS    INTERNAL-URL           EXTERNAL-URL
auth            Running   auth.hasura            http://auth.gram29.hasura-app.io
data            Running   data.hasura            http://data.gram29.hasura-app.io
filestore       Running   filestore.hasura       http://filestore.gram29.hasura-app.io
gateway         Running   gateway.hasura
le-agent        Running   le-agent.hasura
notify          Running   notify.hasura          http://notify.gram29.hasura-app.io
platform-sync   Running   platform-sync.hasura
postgres        Running   postgres.hasura
session-redis   Running   session-redis.hasura
sshd            Running   sshd.hasura

Contacting other microservices during local development of a microservice

To contact microservices on a cluster from your localhost while in development you need to port forward the service from the cluster to your localhost.

Examples:

# port forward the postgres microservice in namespace hasura to local port 6432
$ hasura microservice port-forward postgres -n hasura --local-port 6432

# port forward the custom microservice <my-app> to local port 8080
$ hasura microservice port-forward <my-app> --local-port=8080

Run the command hasura microservice port-forward -h for more information on the command options.