Ribbon plays an critical role in supporting inter-process communication in the cloud. The library includes Netflix's client side load balancers and clients for middle tier services.

Ribbon provides the following features:

• Multiple and pluggable load balancing rules
• Integration with service discovery
• Built-in failure resiliency
• Cloud enabled
• Clients integrated with load balancers
• Configuration based client factory

There are three sub projects:

• ribbon-core: includes load balancer and client interface definitions, common load balancer implementations, integration of client with load balancers and client factory.
• ribbon-eureka: includes load balancer implementations based on Eureka client, which is the library for service registration and discovery.
• ribbon-httpclient: includes the implementation of REST client integrated with load balancers. It also includes the sample application in its test sources.

Please note that the default client configured in ribbon-core is the REST client in ribbon-httpclient. Unless this is changed in client applications, ribbon-core has runtime dependency on ribbon-httpclient.