Microservice architectures are the ‘new normal’. Building small, self-contained, ready to run applications can bring great flexibility and added resilience to your code. Spring Boot’s many purpose-built features make it easy to build and run your microservices in production at scale. And don’t forget, no microservice architecture is complete without Spring Cloud ‒ easing administration and boosting your fault-tolerance.
What are microservices?
Microservices are a modern approach to software whereby application code is delivered in small, manageable pieces, independent of others.
Why build microservices?
Their small scale and relative isolation can lead to many additional benefits, such as easier maintenance, improved productivity, greater fault tolerance, better business alignment, and more.
Microservices with Spring Boot
With Spring Boot, your microservices can start small and iterate fast. That’s why it has become the de facto standard for JavaTM microservices. Quickstart your project with Spring Initializr and then package as a JAR. With Spring Boot’s embedded server model, you’re ready to go in minutes.
The distributed nature of microservices brings challenges. Spring helps you mitigate these. With several ready-to-run cloud patterns, Spring Cloud can help with service discovery, load-balancing, circuit-breaking, distributed tracing, and monitoring. It can even act as an API gateway.
Build streaming data microservices with Spring Cloud Stream
Spring Cloud Stream makes it easy to consume and produce events, no matter which messaging platform you choose. Spring Cloud Stream connects your microservices with real-time messaging in just a few lines of code, to help you build highly scalable, event-driven systems.
Spring Boot’s optional instrumentation framework, Micrometer, sends metrics straight to Prometheus, Atlas, and more to provide valuable insights. With Micrometer Tracing, you can ship your spans to different backends (e.g. OpenZipkin or Wavefront) so that you can follow along with what’s happening in real-time.
The small, stateless nature of microservices makes them ideal for horizontal scaling. Platforms like TAS and PKS can provide scalable infrastructure to match, with and greatly reduce your administrative overhead. Using cloud connectors, you can also consume multiple backend services with ease.