How to Build a Scalable Follow Service with MySQL, Redis, and Spring Cloud
This article walks through the complete design and implementation of a friend‑follow microservice, covering requirement analysis, MySQL table schema, Redis set operations, Spring Boot dependencies, configuration, service and controller code, gateway routing, and end‑to‑end testing with concrete examples and performance insights.
Requirement Analysis
Social applications need follow/unfollow, viewing a user's followers and followees, mutual follows, and recommendation features such as “people you may know”. Retrieving a single user's followers from a relational database is straightforward, but computing mutual followers for two or more users requires costly joins. Redis Set provides built‑in SINTER, SUNION and SDIFF operations, enabling fast set‑based queries.
Using Redis sets for each user – one set for the IDs the user follows and another for the IDs of its followers – makes follow, unfollow and mutual‑follow queries O(1) on average.
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