Big Picture

Ocelot is aimed at people using .NET running a microservices (service-oriented) architecture (aka SOA) that need a unified point of entry into their system. However it will work with anything that speaks HTTP(S) and run on any platform that ASP.NET Core supports.

Ocelot consists of a series of ASP.NET Core middlewares arranged in a specific order.

Ocelot manipulates the HttpRequest object into a state specified by its configuration until it reaches a request builder middleware, where it creates a HttpRequestMessage object which is used to make a request to a downstream service. The middleware that makes the request is the last thing in the Ocelot pipeline. It does not call the next middleware. The response from the downstream service is retrieved as the request goes back up the Ocelot pipeline. There is a piece of middleware that maps the HttpResponseMessage onto the HttpResponse object, and that is returned to the client. That is basically it with a bunch of other features!

The following are configurations that you use when deploying Ocelot.

Basic Implementation

Multiple Instances

With Consul

With Service Fabric