Changing spring-cloud-stream instance index/count at runtime

Question

In spring-cloud-stream, is there a way to change the instance count and instance index of an application without restarting it?

Also, is there any recommended way to automatically populate these values? In the microservices world, this seems like it would prohibitively difficult, since services are starting and stopping all the time.

Answer 1

In spring-cloud-stream, is there a way to change the instance count and instance index of an application without restarting it?

Not in the current version, but open to discuss this in the context of a GitHub issue.

Also, is there any recommended way to automatically populate these values? In the microservices world, this seems like it would prohibitively difficult, since services are starting and stopping all the time.

My recommendation would be to look at http://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-dataflow/ which helps with the orchestration of complex microservice topologies (and is designed to work in conjunction with Spring Cloud Stream for streaming scenarios)