How to Integrate Sentinel with Spring Cloud Gateway for Advanced Flow Control

Overview

Sentinel can be used not only between services but also together with API gateways such as Spring Cloud Gateway or Zuul to implement flow control. Since version 1.6.0, Sentinel provides an adapter module for Spring Cloud Gateway that supports two resource dimensions for limiting traffic: route‑level (using the routeId as the resource name) and custom API groups defined by the user.

Dependency

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.alibaba.csp</groupId>
  <artifactId>sentinel-spring-cloud-gateway-adapter</artifactId>
</dependency>

YAML Configuration

server:
  port: 2001
spring:
  application:
    name: gateway-service
  profiles:
    active: dev
  cloud:
    nacos:
      discovery:
        server-addr: 127.0.0.1:8848
    sentinel:
      transport:
        port: 8719
        dashboard: localhost:8080
      scg:
        fallback:
          mode: response
          response-status: 426
          response-body: error request
    gateway:
      routes:
        - id: stock_route
          uri: lb://stock-service
          predicates:
            - Path=/stock/**

Start the Gateway

-Dcsp.sentinel.app.type=1

Configure Flow‑Control Rules

Using Sentinel’s management console, add flow‑control rules for the defined route (e.g., stock_route) to limit request rates.

Conclusion

By integrating Sentinel with Spring Cloud Gateway, you can easily set up traffic control for a cluster of services or multiple service entry points. The example shows basic error‑response handling; more advanced custom exception handling and production‑grade scenarios can be achieved by extending Sentinel’s features or customizing the source code.