In this blog post, we will delve into the world of microservices by developing a full-fledged application using Spring Boot. We will design, build, and deploy microservices that communicate with each other over REST APIs, covering essential concepts such as service registration and discovery with Eureka, API gateway using Zuul, and load balancing with Ribbon. We will manage configurations using Spring Cloud Config and secure our services with Spring Security.
The microservices architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.
Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based applications that you can "just run". It simplifies the bootstrapping and development of a new Spring application. Here is a basic example:
@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {
public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
}
}
Eureka is the Netflix Service Discovery Server and Client. The server can be configured and deployed to be highly available, with each server replicating the state about the registered services to the others.
Zuul is a JVM-based router and server-side load balancer by Netflix. It provides a unified “front door” to the backend services, which can be hosted on different servers and possibly implemented in different programming languages.
Ribbon is a Inter Process Communication (remote procedure calls) library with built-in software load balancers. The primary usage model involves REST calls with various serialization scheme support.
Spring Cloud Config provides server-side and client-side support for externalized configuration in a distributed system. With the Config Server, you have a central place to manage external properties for applications across all environments.
Spring Security is a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework. It is the de-facto standard for securing Spring-based applications.
Microservices have found their place in the development of highly scalable and modular applications. They have been successfully implemented by companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Uber, where each microservice takes care of a specific business capability.
Ready to start learning? Start the quest now