Microservices are small, loosely coupled distributed services.
Microservices architecture is developed as a solution to address the scalability, independently deployable, and innovation challenges of a monolithic architecture. It allows us to decompose large applications into small components with certain designated responsibilities that can be managed efficiently.
It is considered a building block of modern applications. Microservices can be written in a variety of programming languages and frameworks, but why is Spring Boot one of the best frameworks for microservices development?
As we all know, Spring Boot is built on the traditional Spring framework. Therefore, it provides all the features of Spring.
Spring Boot is a microservices-based framework that can create production-ready applications in a fraction of the time. In Spring Boot, most things are configured automatically. We just need to use the correct configuration to take advantage of specific functionality.
Spring Boot is very useful if we want to develop REST API. Therefore, in this article, we will discuss 7 points to prove that Spring Boot is the best choice for microservices development.
1. Embedded server
In a microservices architecture, hundreds of microservice instances may need to be deployed at a given time. We want to automate the development and deployment of microservices to the greatest extent possible. Embedded servers are built as part of a deployable application.
If we take a Java application as an example, then it is a JAR. The advantage of this is that we don't need to pre-install the server in the deployment environment. So the first reason to choose Spring Boot is because of the existence of the embedded server.
Unlike Spring MVC projects where we have to manually add and install the Tomcat server, Spring Boot comes with an embedded Tomcat server so that applications can be hosted on it.
There are alternatives to Tomcat. You can also use Jetty as an embedded server. If you use Jetty, you must use the element in the XML configuration file and specify the element as shown below.
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-jetty</artifactId>
</dependency>
2. Support load balancer
Another important point in choosing Spring Boot for microservice development is that it supports load balancers.
In microservice applications, we need automatic scaling.
Auto-scaling means there is a lot of load on a particular service, like more customers coming in and logging into the application, or maybe we are running some offers, so my product is in high demand and a lot of people are buying my product.
So let's see if the product service is getting load or if the customer service is getting load then we should have some automation environment using Docker and Kubernetes and using these tools you can create more and more specific Service instance.
load, in this case we need a load balancer to achieve that. There are some free projects in the Spring framework that are production-ready that you can use in your applications.
You don't have to write a load balancer, Spring will provide one for you, so the load balancer comes with Spring Boot. We can build a microservice application and use Spring Cloud LoadBalancer to provide client-side load balancing for calling other microservices.
3. Automatic configuration
Let's say you want to build your application quickly, because in microservices you have to build quickly.
For example, if you want some database connections, there should be some starter dependencies that help you configure the session factory, connection factory, data sources and all that stuff. So you don't have to create these beans, and the same goes for security.
In Spring Boot, everything is automatically configured, unlike Spring MVC projects. We just need to use the correct configuration to take advantage of specific functionality.
4. Minimum code using annotations
Annotations are a form of metadata that provide data about a program. They provide additional information about the program.
Annotations have no direct effect on the operation of the code they annotate, and they do not change the operation of the compiled program. There are many very useful annotations in Spring Boot that can minimize code.
For example, if we want to use Hibernate (ORM), then we just add @Table annotation above the model/entity class and add @Column annotation to map it to the table and column in the database.
So there are many, many more such examples. You'll explore these things when you start learning Spring Boot.
5. Loose coupling
Spring has provided us with the two most important features to achieve loose coupling from the beginning.
- Inversion of Control Inversion of Control
- Dependency Injection dependency injection
Obviously, with Spring Boot you can create highly loose applications.
6. Dependency management
Dependency management is simply a way of managing all required dependencies in one place and utilizing them efficiently. Spring-Boot Starters play an important role in dependency management.
In Spring Boot, there are many starter projects available, such as Spring Boot Starter Data JPA, Spring Boot Starter Security, etc.
There are a lot of different applications involved that can quickly get dependencies for you without you having to know how to do it and manually go to the Maven repository and configure it.
7. Open source
One of the main features of Spring Boot is that it is open source and there are many vendors working on it. There are many, many developers using Spring Boot, so you have a very broad view of developers.
People are working in Java now and most of them are familiar with Spring as this is almost a popular framework. So, this is open source, the knowledge between developers is equal, so obviously if a problem occurs, developers can communicate with each other and solve the problem.
Summarize
These are the 7 most important reasons why you should choose Spring Boot for microservices development. You should have a good grasp of Spring Boot, and you should pay attention to these reasons when developing microservices.
Therefore, microservices development is an important part of web development. You should be clear about the reasons why you should choose Spring Boot for microservice development. You should have a good grasp of SpringBoot and microservices development to build efficient applications.