Spring Microservices in Action: how is it different from all the Spring reference guides?

[Billy Tsai]

How is the book different from all the reference guides on https://spring.io/guides? for example https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current-SNAPSHOT/reference/htmlsingle/
And what projects on https://spring.io/projects does the book cover?

[Frederic van West]

Are Spring Microservices just the latest RPC, COM objects, VBX components?

[John Carnell]

Hi Billy,

Fair question.  One of the main reasons why I wrote the book is because the guides often times provider just a cursory overview of their individual subject material.  They are great for getting you started, but literally once you move to the next stage you are left on your own.  Personally, I felt that way too looking through the Spring Cloud documentation.  This book focuses on the core of Spring Cloud, specifically:  Spring Cloud Configuration Server, Netflix Eureka, Zuul, Spring Cloud Security, Hystrix, Spring Cloud Bus and Spring Cloud Sleuth.  Right about the time I was finishing the book, Spring Cloud Flow and a couple of the other projects were released so they are not in the book.

Personally, if you just want to learn how to write JSON/REST based services, this book does not go into a tremendous amount of detail beyond just an introduction Spring Boot.  (Craig Walls book on Spring Book does a much better job then my book on covering Spring Boot in detail.)

   Thanks,
       John

[John Carnell]

Hi Fredrick,

I think microservices in general are in a long-line of distributed computing approaches.  One of the reasons why I think JSON/REST based services are different then other approaches is that they follow an emergent behavior (e.g their industry adopted practices HTTP/JSON/REST) rather then heavy, industry imposed standards (e.g. EJB, CORBA, DCOM, etc....)  I think the concept of a JSON/REST-based interface is here to stay, but one of the more interesting things I think will be falling out in the next few year is whether we will continued to have microservices as standlone servers or if they the logic in a microservice is supplanted with serverless functions like AWS Lambdas or Google's FaaS offerings.  With the current microservices approach, every service instance is a running server which means in a large scale microservices environment you could easily have 1000s of server instances running.  Thats a lot of operational overhead.  I can see a point where we still maintain a JSON/REST-based interface (ala AWS API Gateway), but the actual microservice logic runs in a function rather then a service.

   Thanks,
       John

[Kent O. Johnson]

I concur on the spring.io guides and docs being very surface level or too deep to be useful.

It takes a lot of reading, re-reading, and trial and error to get things working from the Spring docs. It took me a long time (some parts over 2 weeks) to get my current OAuth2 JWT security setup working just going off of docs and community members' GitHub repos.