7 Major Reasons to Choose Spring Boot For Microservices Development

Microservices are small, loosely coupled distributed services. Microservices architecture evolved as a solution to the scalability, independently deployable, and innovation challenges with Monolithic Architecture. It provides us to take a big application and break it into efficiently manageable small components with some specified responsibilities. It is considered the building block of modern applications. Microservices can be written in a variety of programming languages, and frameworks, but why Spring Boot is one of the best frameworks for Microservices Development?

As we know Spring Boot is built on top of the conventional Spring Framework. So, it delivers all the features of Spring. Spring Boot is a microservice-based framework that makes a production-ready application in very less time. In Spring Boot most of the things are auto-configured. We just need to use the proper configuration for utilizing a particular functionality. Spring Boot is very beneficial if we want to develop REST API. So in this article, we will discuss 7 major points to prove Spring Boot is Best for Microservices Development.

7 Major Reasons to Choose Spring Boot for Microservices Development

1. Embedded Server

In the microservice architecture, there may be hundreds of microservice instances deployed at a given time. We would like to automate the development and deployment of microservices to the maximum extent possible. An embedded server is implanted as part of the deployable application. If we take the example of Java applications, then it would be a JAR. The benefit of it is, we don’t require the server pre-installed in the deployment environment. So the first point why you’re choosing Spring Boot is because of the presence of the embedded server. 

Unlike the Spring MVC project where we have to manually add and install the tomcat server, Spring Boot comes with an embedded Tomcat server, so that the applications can be hosted on it. There are other options also apart from Tomcat. You can also use Jetty for the embedded server. If you use Jetty then you have to use an <exclusion> element in the XML configuration file and specify the <dependency> element as follows.

XML

<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 major point to choosing Spring Boot for Microservices Development is, it supports Load Balancer. In the Microservices application, we need auto-scaling. Auto-scaling means that there are lots and lots of loads coming to one particular service like some more customers coming in and logging into the application or maybe we are running some offer so my products are getting a huge demand and lots of people are purchasing my products. 

So let’s see if the product service is getting the load or the customer service is getting the load then we should have some automated environment using Docker & Kubernetes and using these tools you can create more and more instances of that particular service in case of a high load and in that case, we need a load balancer to implement. And there are some free projects available in Spring framework which is production ready and you can use it in your application. You don’t have to write a load balancer, spring is going to give you one so the load balancer comes free with the Spring Boot. We can build a microservice application that uses Spring Cloud LoadBalancer to provide client-side load-balancing to call other microservices.

3. Auto Configuration

Let’s say you want to build an application fast because in Microservices you have to build fast. For example, if you want some database connectivity there should be some starter dependency that is going to help you to configure your Session Factory, Connection Factory, Data Source, and all these things. So you don’t have to create those beans and the same goes for the security also. In spring boot everything is auto-configured, unlike the Spring MVC Project. We just need to use the proper configuration for utilizing a particular functionality.

4. Minimal Code using Annotations

Annotations are a form of metadata that provides data about a program. They provide additional information about a program. Annotations do not have a direct effect on the operation of the code they annotate and they do not change the action of the compiled program. There are plenty of annotations available in Spring Boot that are highly useful and they minimize the code. 

For example, if we want to use Hibernate(ORM) then we can just add @Table annotation above the model/entity class and add @Column annotation to map it to the table and columns in the database. So there are many many examples like this. When you start learning Spring Boot you will explore these things.

5. Loose Coupling

Spring from the starting days provides us with the two most important features to achieve loose coupling.

1. Inversion of Control
2. Dependency Injection

So obviously using Spring Boot you can create highly loose applications.

6. Dependency Management

Dependency Management is just a way of managing all the required dependencies in one place and efficiently making use of them. Working with dependency management, Spring-Boot Starters plays an important role here. In Spring Boot, there are a lot of starters project which are available like Spring Boot Starter Data JPA, Spring Boot Starter Security, etc. There are a lot of different applications which are involved which are gonna grab the dependency quickly for you and you don’t have to know to do it and manually go to the Maven repo and have to configure the things. 

To read more refer to this article: Spring Boot – Dependency Management

7. Open Source

One of the major features of Spring Boot is, it’s open-source, and lots of vendor work on this open-source. There are lots and lots of developers working on Spring Boot so you have a very vast knowledge of the developers. People are working in Java right now and most of them are familiar with Spring because this is pretty much a popular framework. So this is open source and the knowledge is equally balanced between the developer so obviously if something happens the developer can communicate with each other and fix the issues.

Conclusion

These 7 most important reasons state why you should choose spring boot for microservices development. You should have a good command over spring boot and when you develop microservices, you should pay attention to these reasons. Microservices development is an essential part of web development and hence. you should be well aware of the reasons why you should choose spring boot for microservices development. You should have a good command over SpringBoot and microservices development to build an efficient application.