[FIXED] Why do we use port number localhost: 8080? Why don't we use a port number when using www.example.com?

Issue

When I use a Spring Boot app in local it uses, localhost:8080. When it is pushed to Pivotal Cloud Foundry, it has some route https://my-app.xyz-domain.com and we can access the URL without a port, what is happening behind the scene?

Please help me understand.

Solution

On CloudFoundry, your application is actually still running on localhost:8080. The reason that you can access your application through https://my-app.xyz-domain.com is that the platform handles routing the traffic from that URL to your application.

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The way this works is as follows:

1. You deploy your application. It's run by the foundation in a container. The container is assigned a port, which it provides to the application through the $PORT env variable (this can technically change, but it's been 8080 for a long time). Your application then listens on localhost:$PORT or effectively localhost:8080.

2. The platform also runs Envoy in your container. It's configured to listen for incoming HTTP and HTTPS requests, and it will proxy that traffic to your application on localhost:$PORT.

3. Using the cf cli, you map a route to your application. This is a logical rule that tells the platform what external traffic should go to your application. A route can consist of a hostname, domain, and/or path. For example, my-cool-app.example.com or my-cool-app.example.com/foo. For a route to work, the domain must have its DNS directed to the platform.

4. When an end-user accesses the route that you mapped, the DNS resolves to the platform and the traffic is directed to the external load balancers (sometimes TCP/layer4, sometimes HTTPS/layer7) that sit in front of the platform. These proxies do not have knowledge of CF, they just proxy incoming traffic.

5. Traffic from the external load balancers is spread across the set of the platform Gorouters. The Gorouter is a second layer of proxies, but these proxies have knowledge of the platform, specifically, all of the routes that have been mapped on the platform and where those applications actually live.

   When a request comes to Gorouter, it will recognize the route like my-cool-app.example.com and look up the location of the container where that app is running. Traffic from Gorouter is then proxied to the Envoy which is running in the app container. This ties into step two as the Envoy will route that traffic to your application.

All in total, incoming requests are routed like this:

Client/Browser -> External LBs -> Gorouters -> Envoy -> Application

Answered By - Daniel Mikusa
Answer Checked By - Robin (JavaFixing Admin)