Spring Microservices in Action

by John Carnell

With microservices, you build applications from very small, loosely coupled, and distributed services. Spring Boot and Spring Cloud offer Java developers an easy migration path from traditional monolithic Spring applications to microservice-based applications that can be deployed to multiple cloud platforms. The Spring Boot and Spring Cloud frameworks let you quickly build microservices that are ready to be deployed to a private corporate cloud or a public cloud like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Pivotal’s CloudFoundry.

Spring Microservices in Action teaches you how to use the Spring Boot and Spring Cloud frameworks to build and deploy microservice-based cloud applications. You'll begin with an introduction to the microservice pattern and how to build microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. Then you'll get hands-on and discover how to configure Spring Boot. Using lots of real-world examples, you'll learn topics like service discovery with Spring Cloud, Netflix Eureka, and Ribbon. Next, you'll find out how to handle potential problems using client-side resiliency patterns with Spring and Netflix Hystrix. This book also covers implementing a service gateway with Spring Cloud and Zuul and event processing in the cloud with Spring Cloud Stream. Finally, you'll learn to deploy and push your application to cloud services, including AWS and CloudFoundry. By the end of this book, you'll not only be able to build your own microservice-based applications, but how operationalize and scale your microservices so they can deployed to a private or public cloud.

Genres: Programming, Technology, Technical, Computer Science, Software, Architecture, Engineering

384 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2017

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Reviews

[Alex Ott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Between 3 & 4 - quite good, but not very detailed description of Spring Cloud components - just enough to get understanding what's possible to do...

Rounded down to 3 due many typos, code/text inconsistencies, and formatting issues (in Kindle version). Errors will be sent to author...

[Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books on Microservices with a java specification I have come across. I would highly recommend, even if you don't use Java. The description detailing how Microservices should be created from the application layer, to the business layer and to the distributed tracing for logging purposes. This book articulates the entire software cycle for developing distributed systems and the inevitable complications that occur when working with complex components. Any intermediate to advanced developer should pick this up.

5 Stars.

[Vitor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book to understand how to build microservices using Netflix OSS technologies through Spring Cloud. If you always wondered how to build a "Cloud Native" service in Java, this is the book. Unfortunately, this book won't be a 5-star due to the writing quality. There are too many holes in the code examples: the chapter about security barely works, you have to research by yourself. I don't advise this book for people that does not have experience with Spring framework.

To sum up, this book teaches many concepts that are required for a sane life dealing with microservices such as Service Discovery (Netflix Eureka), Load balance, Circuit-breakers & Bulkheads (Netflix Ribbon), API Gateway (Netflix Zuul), Log tracing, Distributed tracing (Zipkin), and others. On the other hand, it requires some prior experience on Spring framework from the reader.

[Bradley Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to Spring-based micro-services. Was a great medium of technical information while also providing the high-level architectural insights of micro-services.

After recently moving into a role that exposed me to micro-services for the first time and this book helped accelerate my knowledge in this area.

[Yifan Yang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book serves as an excellent guide for beginners in microservices using Java, particularly with the Java Spring Boot/Spring Cloud tech stack. It elucidates key concepts and offers popular solutions to address common concerns in microservices architectures. As such, it serves as a 'Microservices 101' for those who are inexperienced but wish to get a glimpse of industry practices.

On the flip side, the book doesn't delve deeply into the mechanisms of individual Java libraries, middlewares, or tradeoffs among competing options. Therefore, I believe the supposed readers should have a solid working experience in Java, be familiar with concepts of well-known components like Kafka or ElasticSearch, and without hands-on experience with building a complete microservices system.

[فاروق الفرشيشي · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covered a lot of topics concerning Spring Cloud. Unfortunately some advanced topics were just ignored because "they would make things more complicated". The problem is, we buy such books with hell a lot of money, instead of following some dump tutorial, exactly to find those goddam advanced topics!

[Murray Cumming · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like how this discusses how you might build a full microservices-based system, including configuration, service discovery, client-side load balancing, routing, tracing, message queues, and OAuth2 security, as well as thoughts about continuous deployment. The books's use of Spring Boot and Spring Cloud seems like a good way to exercise these concepts. The actual Spring APIs and example code are very simple so the book is mostly a discussion of general ideas, put into practice with Java, Docker, and the Spring Cloud defaults, such as Netflix Zuul, Netflix Hysterix, Netflix Eureka, Kafka, and Zipkin.

I particularly like that the author set up real working code for each chapter that could easily be built and run locally as a set of docker images.

Unfortunately, the text about the code is incredibly verbose and repetitive, almost as if the text was being intentionally padded to reach a word limit. Far too many sentences or paragraphs are simple slight rewordings, and some things are stated and restated three or four time in succession. It would have been easier to read without that weirdness.

Unfortunately, the Kindle version (at least the one I got from Manning, not from Amazon), doesn't present the example code well, using really awkward images instead of actual text for most code. The code in those images is also a really faint gray. ("The Go Programming Language" has the best formatting for source code that I've ever seen in a Kindle book.)

[Bojack Horseman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is quite good for anyone willing to enter the microservices world. It shows you an overview of every component and why you need it.

The things that I quite don't like are that there are a lot of code samples with typos or that simply doesn't work as is, too much setup to do for every chapter (yes you can use the provided repo) but it's not the same if you want to do everything from scratch, although it's understandable, if she explained everything the book would be about 2000 pages.

But overall she explains the why and how to do it, you could easily apply this for your projects and as a developer finding the answers of more things that are either left out or not really that understandable is pretty easy to do.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book did not age well. While chapter one is still a useful primer on Microservices, we see the age of the book start to appear in chapter two, when it mentions building Spring applications in Java or Groovy and it's still on the Spring Boot 1 train. Thankfully, the main concepts still apply, but the usefulness of the code samples are greatly reduced. Chapters 3/4/5/6/7/10 can be summed up to say use Kubernetes and Istio and you won't need to add 99% of this logic to your application. Eight and nine are still perfectly applicable as a introduction, but like two, their code samples are outdated if you're writing something today and not super helpful, especially if you are using K8S.

[Kiki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would recommend that authors consider observing a developer as they work through the project build-up in the chapters. This approach could help identify and address areas for improvement, such as errors, inconsistencies, or a lack of clarity in project build-up.

Unfortunately, I found it challenging to continue using the book after a week, as resolving project issues at nearly every step became too time-consuming. Usually I rely on books as quality references, and it felt as though this one might have been written a bit too hastily, which impacted its overall usability.

That being said, I wish the authors all the best—writing a book is undoubtedly a tremendous undertaking!

[Alex Domínguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un excelente libro para conocer de forma general las herramientas mas usadas en el desarrollo de microservicios, el autor explica de forma sencilla y puntual y los ejemplos en código son muy buenos, lo recomiendo ampliamente para todos los interesados en el tema que usan Java como lenguaje en sus proyectos.
Es recomendable que se tenga una buena base de Spring Boot y Docker.
Está por salir la segunda edición y uno de los cambios que considero importante es que se actualiza al uso de Resilence4J en vez Hystrix.

[dantelk · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think for such a broad area (from microservice communication patterns to containers, and then devops), there was simply too much code involved. I think a tech book should either be abstract (no or minimal code implementation) or fully hands on code oriented. I wish there was less code and more text.

I guess all software vendors which were mentioned in this book already have great how-to documents which we can refer to. I'd prefer the authors to put more input about their opinion and not xml files etc.

[Sarah Faron · Rating 4 out of 5]

An overall great introduction to microservices. Easy to follow to an extent, but some technology discussed has clearly developed beyond the tutorials provided. That's to be expected with any book about software, so I don't blame the authors for that.

Also the book being dedicated to women pusuing STEM careers was a pleasant surprise that gave me some extra motivation while going through the exercises. 🤍

[hstanciu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read the MEAP. Excellent book.
Informative. Towards the end, the last chapter presents the CI/CD part with deployment and a loot of tooling (AWS, Kubernetes, Helm, etc) that is kind of rushed. I understand that the purpose of this book is not going to explain in detail this part. But since this was started to be explained, it should be done with a sufficient amount of details.

[Oleg Prozorov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good description of one of the approaches to build microservices. Some parts are quite opinionated and presented as the only one true way of doing things. Overall if you follow described steps you will build very modern, scalable and maintanable system.

[Andrzej · Rating 4 out of 5]

Together with the author, you will be building from the ground a microservice based. In each chapter, a new microservice concept is being introduced and implemented using Spring Cloud, Spring Boot, and Docker.

If you are not familiar with microservice concepts or want to get now the tooling used in Java world this is a great book to read. Each concept is implemented and each relevant piece of code is thoroughly explained.

[Tonmoy Chowdhury · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found the author's writing to be very structured. He doesn't jump to using a technology from the Spring stack unless he explains the purpose behind it and how it fits into a microservice based architecture. The examples are lucid and illustrative. Good for a beginner.

[Daniel Volnitsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book if speaking about content. The only drawback for me was the version of Spring Cloud used in the book as it drastically differs from the current one. Looking forward to reading the second edition of the book.

[Du · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept about microservice in this book serves well. Like the In Action series, the book is easy to follow and quite easy to understand for me. However, technical books are never going to keep up with the tech itself, the model and the tools used in the book are deprecated in 2020.

[Amr Khaled · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book for beginners, i was expecting more but I'm disappointed but still good content for beginners

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not an easy read but very informative. Some parts feel like a high school paper that has a word count requirement other parts. Could be more concise.

[Alaa Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good balance between high-level architecture and engineering discipline...
Highly recommend.

[Michael Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

liked the examples - guess it will be outdated very soon

[Girish B · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really informative book. Easy to read and understand.

[Omar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview, although nowadays a little outdated, of Spring Cloud. I was only surprised with the high number of typos and spelling errors.

[Zbyszek Sokolowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost perfect, everything what is needed to write Spring based apps. I will definitely return to it. and I'm waiting for second edition.

[Aymenbraiek]

really Good book for java developers
he make me newest practice and few technologies such as design pattern and how deploy micro-services

[Hung Chu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A technology book trying to pack some theoretical ideas. It covers important spring boot/cloud services, but the examples are hard to run and not adequately explained.

[Atif Eden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not bad at all! However, I really didn't like the Oauth 2.0 part. I got lost easily while reading it, and it seems that this chapter needs some updates though.

[Sameh Amin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book about spring, but unfortunately it's not oriented to cover one topic in details, either microservices or spring.