Spring Cloud

Last month I watched SpringOne2GX 2015 replay: Getting Started with Spring Cloud.  OK presentation, but they rush through a lot of material quickly and at the end I just had a general impression of coolness but without much in the way of detailed knowledge of how to use it.

Working through Ryan Baxter's Building Cloud Native Apps with Spring (8 part series) has left me with a better understanding of Spring Cloud.  You could divide this roughly into 4 parts: doing the initial setup of the application, the Spring Cloud Netflix components (Eureka, Zuul, Feign, Hystrix, Turbine), deploying to IBM Bluemix, deploying to Docker.  These are mostly nice bite-sized chunks that you can get through in an hour or so, if you are familiar with the other infrastructure (e.g. if you are not learning and installing Docker for the first time).

At first I tried this with the latest Spring Boot version which was 1.3.1.  I had some problems with that but everything worked with 1.2.8.

I elected not to do parts 6 and 7 which involve the use of IBM Bluemix which I gather is based on Cloud Foundry.  This is not a free service although you can get a 30 day free trial.  No thanks.

Part 8 is about deploying into Docker.  I had been playing around with Docker earlier and had it mostly installed, so this proved to be a bit of a refresher and I learned a few new things too, such as Docker Compose.

Links to all of the blog posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Here is one more... this is sort of an introduction... why do things differently when working in the cloud, microservices architecture, 12-factor: Building Cloud Native Applications.