Spring Boot is a framework to develop Microservices. Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based Applications that you can “just run”.
Spring boot has a lot of modules that can be wired up easily. The following course gives you a very good overview of Spring boot and establishes a solid foundation. It covers how to start a Spring boot project from Spring Initializr or IDE, Spring Boot Dependencies, Embedded tomcat server, RestController, Spring Data JPA, Actuator, Spring Boot CLI, and so on
Microservices
Once you are done with the above course, you must be having a stand-alone Spring boot application that can be considered a single microservice. Important things to learn in microservices would be
- Communication and Service Discovery
- Fault Tolerance and Resilience
- Microservices Configuration
- Communication and Service Discovery:
I recommend going through the Microservices Level 1 course which covers Service discovery of microservices and their communication. The service discovery happens through a dedicated server called a discovery server and all other services are called discovery clients. The most famous service discovery service for spring boot is Eureka.
Once the microservices register with the discovery server, it can view other services and can communicate with them using their hostname using RestTemplate API calls
2. Fault Tolerance and Resilience
Once going through the microservices Level 1 course, this course can be taken. This is a very interesting course that deals with details on how to develop a fault-tolerant and resilient microservice. The important thing to note here is a circuit breaker framework called Hystrix which is now replaced by another framework called resiliency4j
3. Microservices Configuration
This is the place where we learn about the configuration of a Spring boot microservice. Gone are the days when we updated the config in the production and restarted the system. It was very complex in the older days and now thanks to the Spring Cloud Config framework, because of this configuration is very simple and can be updated real-time without server restarts. This can be achieved by calling the Actuator endpoint of a microservice.
Next Steps
Spring Security and JWT with Spring Boot
By this step, you know what is Spring Boot and how to develop microservices. This is the right place to introduce you to the Spring Security and JWT with a Spring Boot application. This is the most widely used combination
Spring Cloud API Gateway
Learning Spring Cloud Gateway will take you very closer to the real-world application architecture and you will learn how the application works in the cloud.
Spring Cloud Gateway
Level up your Java code and explore what Spring can do for you.
I work as a freelance Architect at Ontoborn, who are experts in putting together a team needed for building your product. This article was originally published on my personal blog.