Spring Boot: Has its day passed?

[Terry Milan]

I looked into Spring Boot last year.  It seemed to be the hot topic back then.  This year I don't see it as much as a job requirement.  Are companies starting to reconsider this and moving onto the next Microservice architecture such as Docker?

Also, I bought a book on Spring Boot over a year ago.  I haven't inspected your book yet, but I feel the other book was rushed to tap a hot market.  It demonstrated just web server wrapped in Spring Boot's container.  I don't feel that it gave a real world example of microservices.

Lastly, as I read about Spring Boot all I could wonder is: Is this the new EJB?  The world wrestled with EJB for years before just deciding to co-locate.

[Jesper de Jong]

Spring Boot is definitely not obsolete, and Docker is not a replacement for Spring Boot. The two are not alternative solutions for the same problem, they're different things, and it's perfectly reasonable to put a Spring Boot application in a Docker container. In fact, I suspect that is exactly what many people who use Spring Boot to build microservices are doing.

[John Carnell]

Hi Jesper,

I dont think Spring Boot is obsolete at all.  I know several companies (including mine) that a build a majority of their services in Spring Boot or are adopting it.  Also you have to remember in the end Spring Boot just builds down to a executable jar or war.  You still need a server or container to run service.  For our application we have Spring Boot based services deployed on both standalone AWS servers and in Docker containers.  Since, we let the teams choose their own technologies so teams have chosen to deploy their Spring Boot based applications using Docker.

In my book, I build all of services and the Spring Cloud services using Spring Boot and then deploy the Spring Boot based services using Docker.  In Chapter 10, I deploy all of the Spring Boot-based services that I built into Docker containers to Amazon ECS (Amazon's Docker Container Service).  I do think microservices will become a dominant architecture.  The only real question I see is  whether or not the deployment model of a microservice will change.  Will development teams continue with a server/container model or will more companies deploy their microservices as Functions-as-a-service (e.g. Lambda).  The other wildcard in the mix from a deployment model is UniKernels.  Last quarter, during our semi-annual Hackathon I actually worked on team that deployed a Spring-Boot service using a Unikernel.  A Unikernel is single memory address space with almost no operating system.  Unikernels startincredibly fast and because there is almost no operating system present for the kernel to run have a very small attack surface from a security perspective.

   Thanks,
       John  

[Palak Mathur]

John Carnell wrote:Hi Jesper,

I dont think Spring Boot is obsolete at all.  I know several companies (including mine) that a build a majority of their services in Spring Boot or are adopting it.  Also you have to remember in the end Spring Boot just builds down to a executable jar or war.  You still need a server or container to run service.  For our application we have Spring Boot based services deployed on both standalone AWS servers and in Docker containers.  Since, we let the teams choose their own technologies so teams have chosen to deploy their Spring Boot based applications using Docker.

In my book, I build all of services and the Spring Cloud services using Spring Boot and then deploy the Spring Boot based services using Docker.  In Chapter 10, I deploy all of the Spring Boot-based services that I built into Docker containers to Amazon ECS (Amazon's Docker Container Service).  I do think microservices will become a dominant architecture.  The only real question I see is  whether or not the deployment model of a microservice will change.  Will development teams continue with a server/container model or will more companies deploy their microservices as Functions-as-a-service (e.g. Lambda).  The other wildcard in the mix from a deployment model is UniKernels.  Last quarter, during our semi-annual Hackathon I actually worked on team that deployed a Spring-Boot service using a Unikernel.  A Unikernel is single memory address space with almost no operating system.  Unikernels startincredibly fast and because there is almost no operating system present for the kernel to run have a very small attack surface from a security perspective.

   Thanks,
       John  

I agree with what John said here. Spring Boot is not going anywhere soon. People are adopting it. We have adopted it too. We are mostly a Java shop and have been using Docker for over 2 years now. Spring Boot fits right in and give us the opportunity to optimally use ECS and underlying EC2 servers.
The question as posed whether we will continue with Docker and ECS model for deploying and running the applications, is a real one. We are trying to measure our footprints and decide what suits our needs. Lambdas are a good contender and we are making a jump toward the same. But still Docker and Spring Boot powered Microservices are going to stay.

[Kent Bull]

Thanks for your call out to Unikernels, John. The idea seems awesome!

John Carnell wrote:Hi Jesper,

The other wildcard in the mix from a deployment model is UniKernels.  

I'd like to learn how to make one. Any pointers on that?

[Tim Holloway]

Kent O. Johnson wrote:Thanks for your call out to Unikernels, John. The idea seems awesome!

John Carnell wrote:Hi Jesper,

The other wildcard in the mix from a deployment model is UniKernels.  

I'd like to learn how to make one. Any pointers on that?

Yes please. I was thinking that I'd seen something on that in the press recently, but it must have been a lightweight system like cloudOS rather than a bespoke-for-app Unikernel. Current documents and how-to's on Unikernels seem to be mostly in disarray, especially if you're looking for something serious such as running mencoder to do audio-video processing in a Unikernel. Or, say, Postfix email server. Not to mention Java containers like a Spring Boot webserver or Apache ServiceMix.

Despite what Wikipedia says, the first time I ever encountered something that matches the general description of a UniKernel was RTOS for the Prime Computer in the late 1970s. I still have the manual.