Spring Boot is a great candidate for microservices for a variety of reasons! We’ll outline some of the main reasons to help you make an informed decision if you need to consider a tech stack for your next project. It’s worth noting that some of these are not exclusive to Spring Boot, but are definitely good reasons why Spring Boot fits.
What is a Microservice?
Before we get too involved in why Spring Boot Applications fit well into a Microservice pattern, we should look at what a Microservice is… (apologies if this goes over old ground for some of you, but I feel it’s a good place to start!). A Microservice is essentially what the name suggests, it’s an application broken down into smaller parts. For example, in previous architecture, you would usually just develop an application that handles every part of your process but if you’re going down the route of using microservices, you would break down your application into the separation of concerns. A good leader of this is Netflix, they have sort of pioneered this way of thinking by splitting their services into, for example, an application that deals with data storage, another that deals with playback of content, maybe another that handles their “recommended” system.
Advantages with Spring Boot
Deployments
With any deployment, you will usually have to turn an application off, update the code, turn it back on. If you have a full application containing all your processes, the speed of this, plus the “danger” of impacting something else is massive. Therefore, using a microservice in this instance would reduce that, you’re only deploying or upgrading the specific part of the stack that matters. In Spring Boot terms, this could be creating a new REST endpoint for admin users, you wouldn’t want this to affect another part of the platform such as shopping basket functionality for the end-user.
Maintenance
As your applications are split out into smaller services, maintaining them, in theory, should be much easier. Every software engineer will have looked at a mammoth application at some point and been completely overwhelmed, it’s incredibly off-putting and makes working on these applications very difficult. (If you haven’t seen these horrendous applications, you’re lucky!).
Speed
With Spring Boot’s Initializr, there’s really no excuse for not following a microservice architecture when planning your next project. It’s so easy to create a new application with as many or few dependencies as you need and have it ready to go in minutes. One of the major sticking points of this kind of architecture in the past was simply how long it takes which fortunately is no longer a worry.
Whether it be an application that will handle the processing of ActiveMQ queues or User authentication/authorisation or even just handling REST requests to then process further down the line, the Spring Boot Initializr lets the developer pick and choose in an easy way, making it incredibly suitable for a Microservice.
Scaling
This is where one of the most important downsides of having a monolith application comes in. Scaling a full application that handles everything your process does is a nightmare! Being able to choose which applications to allocate more CPU, memory or disk space to is critical to scaling up to handle more and more traffic. Having your Spring Boot applications nicely split up into different Microservices mean that you can fine-tune them to better serve your end-users.
Imagine you have a huge influx of users signing up to your site, you will obviously need to then increase your server allocation for the User Service but maybe your Content Service that handles updating blog posts on the site doesn’t need to change at all. If these were all rolled into one application, you would have to increase everything potentially costing you more time and money, splitting your Spring Boot applications and their dependencies into different services, means you can be more granular and have a more efficient and better-architected stack.
Docker
Spring boot is a great fit for a Microservice architecture because it fits well into the Docker and onto a K8s setup. As it is Java-based, there are so many supported OS’s, versions and into Docker too. Adding a Docker file to your spring boot apps, building and deploying couldn’t really be easier. Once you have done that, you can move on to adding them to a docker-compose file for grouping services together or even onto a Docker Swarm or Kubernetes deployment.
Spring Cloud
Spring Boot has embraced the microservice future of software deployments by developing Spring Cloud, they have even integrated Netflix’s “Eureka” components showing that they are constantly progressing. There’s too much of this to cover in this post, but we watch this space for a post explaining Spring Cloud better.