Configuration

Clients and Servers

Prior to version 6.0, the ClientBuilder/ServerBuilder API was the primary method for configuring the modules inside a Finagle client or server. We are moving away from this model for various reasons.

The modern way of configuring Finagle clients or servers is to use the Finagle 6 API, which is generally available via the with-prefixed methods. For example, the following code snippet creates a new HTTP client altered with two extra parameters: label and transport verbosity.

import com.twitter.finagle.Http

val client = Http.client
  .withLabel("my-http-client")
  .withTransport.verbose
  .newService("localhost:10000,localhost:10001")

A higher-level client API, MethodBuilder, builds on the client, providing logical success rate metrics, application-level retry policies, per-attempt timeouts, and total timeouts.

Note

All the examples in this user guide use the Finagle 6 API as a main configuration method and we encourage all the Finagle users to follow this pattern given that the ClientBuilder/ServerBuilder API will eventually be deprecated. For help migrating, see MethodBuilder migration, the FAQ as well as client and server configuration.

In addition to with-prefixed methods that provide easy-to-use and safe-to-configure parameters of Finagle clients and servers, there is an expert-level Stack API.

The Stack API is available via the configured method on a Finagle client/server that takes a stack param: a value of arbitrary type for which there is an implicit instance of Stack.Param type-class available in the scope. For example, the following code demonstrates how to use .configured to override TCP socket options provided by default.

import com.twitter.finagle.Http
import com.twitter.transport.Transport

val client = Http.client
  .configured(Transport.Options(noDelay = false, reuseAddr = false))
  .newService("localhost:10000,localhost:10001")

Note

The expert-level API requires deep knowledge of Finagle internals and it’s recommended to avoid it unless you’re sure of what you’re doing or the corresponding configuration has not yet been exposed through with-prefixed methods.

Design Principles

Finagle has many different components and we tried to faithfully model our configuration to help understand the constituents and the resulting behavior. For the sake of consistency, the current version of the with API is designed with the following principles in mind.

  1. Reasonable grouping of parameters: We target for the fine grained API so most of the with-prefixed methods take a single argument. Although, there is a common sense driven exception from this rule: some of the parameters only make sense when viewed as a group rather than separately (e.g. it makes no sense to specify SOCKS proxy credentials when the proxy itself is disabled).
  2. No boolean flags (i.e., enabled, yesOrNo): Boolean values are usually hard to reason about because their type doesn’t encode it’s mission in the domain (e.g. in most of the cases it’s impossible to tell what true or false means in a function call). Instead of boolean flags, we use a pair of methods x and noX to indicate whether the x feature is enabled or disabled.
  3. Less primitive number types in the API: We promote a sane level of type-full programming, where a reasonable level of guarantees is encoded into a type-system. Thus, we never use primitive number types for durations and storage units given that there are utility types: Duration and StorageUnit.
  4. No experimental and/or advanced features: While, it’s relatively safe to configure parameters exposed via with-prefixed methods, you should never assume the same about the Stack API (i.e., .configured). It’s easy to configure basic parameters; it’s possible to configure expert-level parameters.

Feature Toggles

Feature toggles are a commonly used mechanism for modifying system behavior. For background, here is a detailed discussion of the topic. As implemented in Finagle they provide a good balance of control between library and service owners which enables library owners to rollout functionality in a measured and controlled manner.

Concepts

A Toggle is a total function from a type-Int to Boolean. These are used to decide whether a feature is enabled or not for a given request or service configuration.

A ToggleMap is a collection of Int-typed Toggles. It provides a means of getting a Toggle for a given an identifier as well as an Iterator over the metadata for its Toggles. Various basic implementations exist on the ToggleMap companion object.

Usage

If a Toggle is on the request path, it is recommended that it be stored in a member variable to avoid unnecessary overhead on the common path. If the Toggle is used only at startup this is unnecessary.

Here is an example Filter which uses a Toggle on the request path:

package com.example.service

import com.twitter.finagle.{Service, SimpleFilter}
import com.twitter.finagle.http.{Request, Response}
import com.twitter.finagle.toggle.{Toggle, ToggleMap}
import com.twitter.finagle.util.Rng

class ExampleFilter(
    toggleMap: ToggleMap,
    newBackend: Service[Request, Response])
  extends SimpleFilter[Request, Response] {

  private[this] val useNewBackend: Toggle = toggleMap("com.example.service.UseNewBackend")

  def apply(req: Request, service: Service[Request, Response]): Future[Response] = {
    if (useNewBackend(Rng.threadLocal.nextInt()))
      newBackend(req)
    else
      service(req)
  }
}

Note that we pass a ToggleMap into the constructor and typically this would be the instance created via StandardToggleMap.apply(“com.example.service”, com.twitter.finagle.stats.DefaultStatsReceiver). This allows for testing of the code with control of whether the Toggle is enabled or disabled by using ToggleMap.On or ToggleMap.Off. This could have also been achieved by passing the Toggle into the constructor and then using Toggle.on or Toggle.off in tests.

Setting Toggle Values

Library Owners

The base configuration for StandardToggles should be defined in a JSON configuration file at resources/com/twitter/toggles/configs/$libraryName.json. The JSON schema allows for descriptions and comments.

Dynamically changing the values across a cluster is specific to a particular deployment and can be wired in via a service-loaded ToggleMap.

Deterministic unit tests can be written that modify a Toggle’s settings via flag overrides using:

import com.twitter.finagle.toggle.flag

flag.overrides.let("your.toggle.id.here", fractionToUse) {
  // code that uses the flag in this block will have the
  // flag's fraction set to `fractionToUse`.
}

Service Owners

At runtime, the in-process Toggle values can be modified using TwitterServer’s “/admin/toggles” API endpoint. This provides a quick way to try out a change in a limited fashion.

For setting more permanent Toggle values, include a JSON configuration file at resources/com/twitter/toggles/configs/$libraryName-service.json. The JSON schema allows for descriptions and comments.

The JSON configuration also supports optional environment-specific overrides via files that are examined before the non-environment-specific configs. These environment-specific configs must be placed at resources/com/twitter/toggles/configs/$libraryName-service-$environment.json where the environment from ServerInfo.apply() is used to determine which one to load.

Tunables

Tunables are a mechanism for service owners to dynamically change configuration parameters of clients and servers at runtime.

Concepts

A Tunable is like a Function0; it produces a value when applied. Dynamic configuration facilitates this value changing across invocations at runtime.

Tunables are accessed by means of a TunableMap, which contains all the Tunables for a given id (ids are keys for distinguishing TunableMaps; each client might have a separate TunableMap that is used for configuration, and the id might be the client label).

Usage

Accessing the TunableMap for a given id is done via StandardTunableMap, using StandardTunableMap.apply(“myId”). The returned map composes in-memory, service-loaded configurations and local files.

Here is an example of configuring the TimeoutFilter on an HTTP client with a Tunable:

package com.example.service

import com.twitter.finagle.Http
import com.twitter.finagle.tunable.StandardTunableMap
import com.twitter.util.Duration
import com.twitter.util.tunable.{Tunable, TunableMap}

val clientId = "exampleClient"
val timeoutTunableId = "com.example.service.Timeout"

val tunables: TunableMap = StandardTunableMap(clientId)
val timeoutTunable: Tunable[Duration] =
  tunables(TunableMap.Key[Duration](timeoutTunableId))

val client = Http.client
  .withLabel(clientId)
  .withRequestTimeout(timeoutTunable)
  .newService("localhost:10000")

Configuration

The value of a given Tunable is the result of the composition of in-memory, service-loaded configurations and local files, in that order. If a configuration does not exist the value from the next configuration is used.

For example, if a server starts up with a file-based configuration for a given id, those values will be used. If the in-memory configuration is then set, those new values will be used.

In-Memory

In-memory configuration is provided through a TunableMap. The Tunable values used by a given instance can be modified using TwitterServer’s /admin/tunables API endpoint.

val map = TunableMap.newMutable(source)

File-Based

File-based configurations are defined in JSON files with the format specified in JsonTunableMapper.

Per-environment and per-instance configurations are supported. Configurations for a given id are composed from files located at resources/com/twitter/tunables/ (ensure that the resources directory is properly packaged with your application) in the following order:

  1. $id/$env/instance-$instance.json
  2. $id/$env/instances.json
  3. $id/instance-$instance.json
  4. $id/instances.json

Where $env and $instance are the environment and instance id given by ServerInfo.apply().

Service-Loaded

A service-loaded TunableMap is loaded through LoadService. For a given id, StandardTunableMap uses LoadService to get a ServiceLoadedTunableMap with a matching id.