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Microservices
for Java Developers
A Hands-On Introduction
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2nd
Edition

Rafael Benevides & Christian Posta

 SECOND EDITION

Microservices for
Java Developers
A Hands-on Introduction
to Frameworks and Containers

Rafael Benevides & Christian Posta

Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo

Microservices for Java Developers
by Rafael Benevides and Christian Posta
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978-1-492-03826-9
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 Table of Contents

1. Microservices for Java Developers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

What Can You Expect from This Report? 1
You Work for a Software Company 2
What Is a Microservices Architecture? 6
Challenges 9
Technology Solutions 15
Preparing Your Environment 16

2. Spring Boot for Microservices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Advantages of Spring Boot 19
Getting Started 21
Hello World 23
Calling Another Service 29
Where to Look Next 35

3. Eclipse MicroProfile for Microservices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Thorntail 38
Getting Started 39
Hello World 40
Calling Another Service 46
Where to Look Next 50

4. API Gateway with Apache Camel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Apache Camel 54
Getting Started 54
Building the API Gateway 55
Where to Look Next 59

iii
5. Deploying Microservices at Scale with Docker and Kubernetes. . . . 61
Immutable Delivery 62
Docker and Linux Containers 63
Kubernetes 65
Getting Started with Kubernetes 68
Where to Look Next 71

6. Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing. . . . 73

Getting Started 73
Fault Tolerance 82
Load Balancing 88
Where to Look Next 91

7. Distributed Tracing with OpenTracing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Installing Jaeger 94
Modifying Microservices for Distributed Tracing 94
Configuring Microservices Using ConfigMap 102
Analyzing the Tracing in Jaeger 104
Where to Look Next 106

8. Where Do We Go from Here?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

Configuration 107
Logging and Metrics 108
Continuous Delivery 109
Summary 109

iv | Table of Contents
 CHAPTER 1
Microservices for Java Developers

What Can You Expect from This Report?

This report is for Java developers and architects interested in devel‐
oping microservices. We start the report with a high-level introduc‐
tion and take a look at the fundamental prerequisites that should be
in place to be successful with a microservices architecture. Unfortu‐
nately, just using new technology doesn’t magically solve distributed
systems problems. Therefore, in this chapter we also explore some
of the forces involved and what successful companies have done to
make microservices work for them, including aspects such as cul‐
ture, organizational structure, and market pressures. Then we take a
deep dive into a few Java frameworks for implementing microservi‐
ces. The accompanying source code repository can be found on Git‐
Hub. Once we have our hands dirty, we’ll come back up for air and
discuss issues around deployment, clustering, and failover, and how
Docker and Kubernetes deliver solutions in these areas. Then we’ll
get back into the details with some hands-on examples with Docker,
Kubernetes, and OpenShift to demonstrate the power they bring to
cloud-native microservices architectures. The last chapter offers
some thoughts on topics that we cannot cover in this report but that
are nonetheless important, like configuration, logging, and continu‐
ous delivery.
Transitioning to microservices involves more than just a technologi‐
cal change. Implementations of microservices have roots in complex
adaptive theory, service design, technology evolution, domain-
driven design, dependency thinking, promise theory, and other

1
areas. They all come together to allow the people in an organization
to truly exhibit agile, responsive learning behaviors and to stay com‐
petitive in a fast-evolving business world. Let’s take a closer look.

You Work for a Software Company

Software really is eating the world. Businesses are slowly starting to
realize this, and there are two main drivers for this phenomenon:
delivering value through high-quality services and the rapid com‐
moditization of technology. This report is primarily written in a
hands-on, by-example format. But before we dive into the technol‐
ogy, we need to properly set the stage and understand the forces at
play. We have been talking ad nauseam in recent years about making
businesses agile, but we need to fully understand what that means.
Otherwise it’s just a nice platitude that everyone glosses over.

The Value of Service

For more than 100 years, our business markets have been about cre‐
ating products and driving consumers to want those products:
desks, microwaves, cars, shoes, whatever. The idea behind this
“producer-led” economy comes from Henry Ford’s theory that if one
could produce great volumes of a product at low cost, the market
would be virtually unlimited. For that to work, you also need a few
one-way channels to directly market to the masses to convince them
that they need these products and their lives will be substantially
better with them. For most of the 20th century, these one-way chan‐
nels existed in the form of advertisements on TV, in newspapers and
magazines, and on highway billboards. However, this producer-led
economy has been flipped on its head because markets are fully
saturated with products (how many phones/cars/TVs do you
need?). Further, the internet, along with social networks, is changing
the dynamics of how companies interact with consumers (or more
importantly, how consumers interact with them).
Social networks allow us, as consumers, to more freely share infor‐
mation with one another and the companies with which we do busi‐
ness. We trust our friends, family, and others more than we trust
marketing departments. That’s why we go to social media outlets to
choose restaurants, hotels, and airlines. Our positive feedback in the
form of reviews, tweets, shares, and the like can positively favor the
brand of a company, and our negative feedback can just as easily and

2 | Chapter 1: Microservices for Java Developers

very swiftly destroy a brand. As depicted in Figure 1-1, there is now
a powerful bidirectional flow of information between companies
and their consumers that previously never existed, and businesses
are struggling to keep up with the impact of not owning their
brands.

Figure 1-1. Social influence

Postindustrial companies are learning they must nurture their rela‐

tionships (using bidirectional communication) with customers to
understand how to bring value to them. Companies do this by pro‐
viding ongoing conversation through service, customer experience,
and feedback. Customers choose which services to consume and
which to pay for depending on which ones bring them value and
good experiences. Take Uber, for example, which doesn’t own any
inventory or sell products per se. You don’t get any value out of sit‐
ting in someone else’s car, but you may be trying to get somewhere
that does bring value (a business meeting, for example). In this way,
using Uber’s service creates value. Going forward, companies will
need to focus on bringing valuable services to customers, and tech‐
nology will drive this through digital services.

The Commoditization of Technology

Technology follows a similar boom-and-bust cycle as economics,
biology, and law. It has led to great innovations, like the steam
engine, the telephone, and the computer. In our competitive mar‐
kets, however, game-changing innovations require a lot of invest‐
ment and build-out to quickly capitalize. This brings more
competition, greater capacity, and falling prices, eventually making

You Work for a Software Company | 3

the once-innovative technology a commodity. Upon these commod‐
ities we continue to innovate and differentiate, and the cycle contin‐
ues. This commoditization has brought us from the mainframe to
the personal computer to what we now call “cloud computing,”
which is a service bringing us commodity computing with almost
no upfront capital expenditure. On top of cloud computing, we’re
now seeing new innovation in the form of digital services.
Figure 1-2 shows the value over time curve.

Figure 1-2. The value over time curve

Open source is also leading the charge in the technology space. Fol‐
lowing the commoditization curve, open source is a place develop‐
ers can go to challenge proprietary vendors by building and
innovating on software that was once only available (without source,
no less) with high license costs. This drives communities to build
things like operating systems (Linux), programming languages (Go),
message queues (Apache ActiveMQ), and web servers (httpd). Even
companies that originally rejected open source are starting to come
around by open sourcing their technologies and contributing to
existing communities. As open source and open ecosystems have
become the norm, we’re starting to see a lot of the innovation in
software technology coming directly from open source communities
(e.g., Apache Spark, Docker, and Kubernetes).

Disruption
The confluence of these two factors—service design and technology
evolution—is lowering the barrier of entry for anyone with a good
idea to start experimenting and trying to build new services. You
can learn to program, use advanced frameworks, and leverage on-
demand computing for next to nothing. You can post to social net‐
works, blog, and carry out bidirectional conversations with potential

4 | Chapter 1: Microservices for Java Developers

users of your service for free. With the fluidity of our business mar‐
kets, any over-the-weekend startup can put a legacy company out of
business.
And this fact scares most CIOs and CEOs. As software quickly
becomes the mechanism by which companies build digital services
and experiences and differentiate themselves, many are realizing
that they must become software companies in their respective verti‐
cals. Gone are the days of massive outsourcing and treating IT as a
commodity or cost center. For companies to stay truly competitive,
they must embrace software as a differentiator, and to do that, they
must embrace organizational agility.

Embracing Organizational Agility

Companies in the industrial-era thinking of the 20th century are not
built for agility. They are built to maximize efficiencies, reduce vari‐
ability in processes, and eliminate creative thinking in workers, plac‐
ing them into boxes the way you would organize an assembly line.
They are built like machines to take inputs, apply a highly tuned
process, and create outputs. They are structured with top-down
hierarchical management to facilitate this machine-like thinking.
Changing the machine requires 18-month planning cycles. Informa‐
tion from the edges goes through many layers of management and
translation to get to the top, where decisions are made and handed
back down. This organizational approach works great when creating
products and trying to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of a pro‐
cess, but does not work for delivering services. Figure 1-3 illustrates
the relation between efficiency and flexibility.

Figure 1-3. Relation between efficiency and flexibility

Customers don’t fit in neat boxes or processes. They show up when‐

ever they want. They want to talk to a customer service representa‐
tive, not an automated phone system. They ask for things that aren’t
on the menu. They need to input something that isn’t on the form.
Customers want convenience. They want a conversation. And they
get mad if they have to wait.

You Work for a Software Company | 5

This means our customer-facing services need to account for varia‐
bility. They need to be able to react to the unexpected. This is at
odds with efficiency. Customers want to have a conversation
through a service you provide them, and if that service isn’t suffi‐
cient for solving their needs, you need loud, fast feedback about
what would help solve their needs and what’s getting in their way.
This feedback can be used by the maintainers of the service to
quickly adjust the service and interaction models to better suit users.
You cannot wait for decisions to bubble up to the top and go
through lengthy planning cycles; you need to make decisions
quickly with the information you have at the edges of your business.
You need autonomous, purpose-driven, self-organizing teams that
are responsible for delivering a compelling experience to consumers
(paying customers, business partners, peer teams, etc.). Rapid feed‐
back cycles, autonomous teams, shared purpose, and conversation
are the prerequisites that organizations must embrace to be able to
navigate and live in a postindustrial, unknown, uncharted world of
business disruption.
No book on microservices would be complete without quoting Con‐
way’s law: “Organizations which design systems…are constrained to
produce designs which are copies of the communication structures
of these organizations.”
To build agile software systems, we must start with building agile
organizational structures. This structure will facilitate the prerequi‐
sites we need for microservices, but what technology do we use?
Building distributed systems is hard, and in the subsequent sections,
we’ll take a look at the problems you must keep in mind when build‐
ing and designing these services.

What Is a Microservices Architecture?

A microservices architecture (MSA) is an approach to building soft‐
ware systems that decomposes business domain models into smaller,
consistently bounded contexts implemented by services. These serv‐
ices are isolated and autonomous yet communicate to provide some
piece of business functionality. Microservices are typically imple‐
mented and operated by small teams with enough autonomy that
each team and service can change the details of its internal imple‐
mentation (including replacing it outright!) with minimal impact

6 | Chapter 1: Microservices for Java Developers

across the rest of the system. Figure 1-4 illustrates how having inde‐
pendent teams aids agility.

Figure 1-4. Independent teams aid agility

Teams communicate through promises, which are a way a service

can publish intentions to other components or systems that may
wish to use the service. They specify these promises with interfaces
of their services and via wikis that document their services. If there
isn’t enough documentation, or the API isn’t clear enough, the ser‐
vice provider hasn’t done their job. (There’ll be a little more on
promises and promise theory in the next section.)
Each team is responsible for designing its service, picking the right
technology for the problem set, deploying and managing the ser‐
vice, and waking up at 2 a.m. to deal with any issues. For example, at
Amazon, there is a single team that owns the tax calculation func‐
tionality that gets called during checkout. The models within this
service (item, address, tax, etc.) are all understood to mean “within
the context of calculating taxes” for a checkout; there is no confu‐
sion about these objects (e.g., is the item a return item or a checkout
item?). The team that owns the tax calculation service designs,
develops, and operates this service. Amazon has the luxury of a
mature set of self-service tools to automate a lot of the build/deploy/
operate steps, but we’ll come back to that.
With microservices, we can scope the boundaries of a service, which
helps us:

• Understand what the service is doing without getting tangled up

in other concerns in a larger application.

What Is a Microservices Architecture? | 7

 • Quickly build the service locally.
• Pick the right technology for the problem (lots of writes? lots of
queries? low latency? bursty?).
• Test the service.
• Build/deploy/release at the cadence necessary for the business,
which may be independent of that of other services.
• Identify and horizontally scale parts of the architecture where
needed.
• Improve the resiliency of the system as a whole.

MSA helps solve the problem of how we decouple our services and
teams to move quickly at scale. It allows teams to focus on providing
the services and making changes when necessary, and to do so
without costly synchronization points. Here are some things you
won’t hear about once you’ve adopted microservices:

• Jira tickets
• Unnecessary meetings
• Shared libraries
• Enterprise-wide canonical models

Is a microservices architecture right for you? Microservices have a

lot of benefits, but they come with their own set of drawbacks. You
can think of microservices as an optimization for problems that
require the ability to change things quickly at scale, but with a price.
This approach is not efficient. It can be more resource-intensive.
You may end up with what looks like duplication. Operational com‐
plexity is a lot higher. It becomes very difficult to understand the
system holistically. It becomes significantly harder to debug prob‐
lems. In some areas you may have to relax the notion of a transac‐
tion. Teams may not have been designed to work like this.
Not every part of the business has to be able to change on a dime. A
lot of customer-facing applications do. Backend systems may not.
But as those two worlds start to blend together, we may see the
forces that justify microservices architectures push to other parts of
the system.

8 | Chapter 1: Microservices for Java Developers

Challenges
Designing cloud-native applications following a microservices
approach requires thinking differently about how to build, deploy,
and operate them. We can’t simply build our application thinking we
know all the ways it will fail and then just prevent those. In complex
systems like those built with microservices, we must be able to deal
with uncertainty. This section will identify five main things to keep
in mind when developing microservices.

Design for Faults

In complex systems, things fail. Hard drives crash, network cables
get unplugged, we do maintenance on the live database instead of
the backups, and virtual machines (VMs) disappear. Single faults
can be propagated to other parts of the system and result in cascad‐
ing failures that take an entire system down.
Traditionally, when building applications, we’ve tried to predict what
pieces of our app (e.g., n-tier) might fail and build up a wall big
enough to keep them from failing. This mindset is problematic at
scale because we cannot always predict what things can go wrong in
complex systems. Things will fail, so we must develop our applica‐
tions to be resilient and handle failure, not just prevent it. We should
be able to deal with faults gracefully and not let faults propagate to
total failure of the system.
Building distributed systems is different from building shared-
memory, single-process, monolithic applications. One glaring differ‐
ence is that communication over a network is not the same as a local
call with shared memory. Networks are inherently unreliable. Calls
over the network can fail for any number of reasons (e.g., signal
strength, bad cables/routers/switches, and firewalls), and this can be
a major source of bottlenecks. Not only does network unreliability
have performance implications with regard to response times to cli‐
ents of your service, but it can also contribute to upstream systems
failure.
Latent network calls can be very difficult to debug; ideally, if your
network calls cannot complete successfully, they fail immediately,
and your application notices quickly (e.g., through IOException). In
this case, you can quickly take corrective action, provide degraded
functionality, or just respond with a message stating the request

Challenges | 9
could not be completed properly and that users should try again
later. But errors in network requests or distributed applications
aren’t always that easy. What if the downstream application you
must call takes longer than normal to respond? This is a killer
because now your application must take into account this slowness
by throttling requests, timing out downstream requests, and poten‐
tially stalling all calls through your service. This backup can cause
upstream services to experience slowdowns and even grind to a halt.
And it can cause cascading failures.

Design with Dependencies in Mind

To be able to move fast and be agile from an organizational or dis‐
tributed systems standpoint, we have to design systems with
dependency thinking in mind; we need loose coupling in our teams,
our technology, and our governance. One of the goals with micro‐
services is to take advantage of autonomous teams and autonomous
services. This means being able to change things as quickly as the
business needs without impacting the services around us or the sys‐
tem at large. It also means we should be able to depend on services,
but if they’re not available or are degraded, we need to be able to
handle this gracefully.
In his book Dependency-Oriented Thinking (InfoQ Enterprise Soft‐
ware Development Series), Ganesh Prasad hits it on the head when
he says, “One of the principles of creativity is to drop a constraint. In
other words, you can come up with creative solutions to problems if
you mentally eliminate one or more dependencies.” The problem is
that our organizations were built with efficiency in mind, and that
brings along a lot of tangled dependencies.
For example, when you need to consult with three other teams to
make a change to your service (DBA, QA, and security), this is not
very agile; each one of these synchronization points can cause
delays. It’s a brittle process. If you can shed those dependencies or
build them into your team (you definitely can’t sacrifice safety or
security, so you should build those components into your team),
you’re free to be creative and more quickly solve problems that cus‐
tomers face or that the business foresees without costly people bot‐
tlenecks.
Another angle to the dependency management story is what to do
with legacy systems. Exposing the details of backend legacy systems

10 | Chapter 1: Microservices for Java Developers

(COBOL copybook structures, XML serialization formats used by a
specific system, etc.) to downstream systems is a recipe for disaster.
Making one small change (customer ID is now 20 numeric charac‐
ters instead of 16) now ripples across the system and invalidates
assumptions made by those downstream systems, potentially break‐
ing them. We need to think carefully about how to insulate the rest
of the system from these types of dependencies.

Design with the Domain in Mind

Models have been used for centuries to simplify and understand a
problem through a certain lens. For example, the GPS maps on our
phones are great models for navigating a city while walking or driv‐
ing, but this model would be completely useless to someone flying a
commercial airplane. The models pilots use are more appropriate to
describe waypoints, landmarks, and jet streams. Different models
make more or less sense depending on the context from which
they’re viewed. Eric Evans’s seminal book Domain-Driven Design
(Addison-Wesley) helps us build models for complex business pro‐
cesses that can also be implemented in software. Ultimately the real
complexity in software is not the technology but rather the ambigu‐
ous, circular, contradicting models that business folks sort out in
their heads on the fly. Humans can understand models given some
context, but computers need a little more help; these models and the
context must be baked into the software. If we can achieve a level of
modeling that is bound to the implementation (and vice versa), any‐
time the business changes, we can more clearly understand how that
changes the software. The process we embark upon to build these
models and the development of the language surrounding them
takes time and requires fast feedback loops.
One of the tools Evans presents is identifying and explicitly separat‐
ing the different models and ensuring they are each cohesive and
unambiguous within their own bounded context (Figure 1-5). Con‐
text mapping lets us visualize the relationships between those differ‐
ent contexts.

Challenges | 11
Figure 1-5. Bounded contexts

A bounded context is a set of domain objects that implement a

model that tries to simplify and communicate a part of the business,
code, and organization. Often, we strive for efficiency when design‐
ing our systems when we really need flexibility (sound familiar?). In
a simple auto parts application, for example, we might try to come
up with a unified “canonical model” of the entire domain, and end
up with objects like Part, Price, and Address. If the inventory
application used the Part object it would be referring to a type of
part, like a type of brake or wheel. In an automotive quality assur‐
ance system, Part might refer to a very specific part with a serial
number and unique identifier to track certain quality test results and
so forth. We might try diligently to efficiently reuse the same canon‐
ical model, but inventory tracking and quality assurance are differ‐
ent business concerns that use the Part object semantically
differently. With a bounded context for the inventory system, a Part
would explicitly be modeled as PartType and be understood within
that context to represent a “type of part,” not a specific instance of a
part. With two separate bounded contexts, these Part objects can
evolve consistently within their own models without depending on
one another in weird ways, and thus we’ve achieved a level of agility
or flexibility. The context map is what allows us to keep track of the
different contexts within the application, to prevent ambiguity.
This deep understanding of the domain takes time. It may take a few
iterations to fully understand the ambiguities that exist in business
models and properly separate them out and allow them to change
independently. This is at least one reason starting off building
microservices is difficult. Carving up a monolith is no easy task, but
a lot of the concepts are already baked into the monolith; your job is

12 | Chapter 1: Microservices for Java Developers

to identify and separate them. With a greenfield project, you cannot
carve up anything until you deeply understand the domain. In fact,
all of the microservice success stories we hear about (like Amazon
and Netflix) started out going down the path of the monolith before
they successfully made the transition to microservices.

Design with Promises in Mind

In a microservices environment with autonomous teams and serv‐
ices, it’s very important to keep in mind the relationship between
service provider and service consumer. As an autonomous service
team, you cannot place obligations on other teams and services
because you do not own them; they’re autonomous by definition. All
you can do is choose whether or not to accept their promises of
functionality or behavior. As a provider of a service to others, all you
can do is promise them a certain behavior. They are free to trust you
or not. Promise theory, a model first proposed by Mark Burgess in
2004 and covered in his book In Search of Certainty (O’Reilly), is a
study of autonomous systems including people, computers, and
organizations providing services to each other. Figure 1-6 illustrates
the difference between an obligation and a promise: an obligation is
placed on a team, while a promise is made by the team.

Figure 1-6. Obligation versus promise

In terms of distributed systems, promises help articulate what a ser‐

vice may provide and make clear what assumptions can and cannot
be made. For example, suppose our team owns a book recommen‐
dation service, and we promise a personalized set of book recom‐
mendations for a specific user you ask about. What happens when

Challenges | 13
you call our service, and one of our backends (the database that
stores that user’s current view of recommendations) is unavailable?
We could throw exceptions and stack traces back to you, but that
would not be a very good experience and could potentially blow up
other parts of the system. Because we made a promise, we can
instead try to do everything we can to keep it, including returning a
default list of books, or a subset of all the books. There are times
when promises cannot be kept, and identifying the best course of
action in these circumstances should be driven by the desired expe‐
rience or outcome for our users. The key here is the onus on our
service to try to keep its promise (return some recommendations),
even if our dependent services cannot keep theirs (the database was
down). In the course of trying to keep a promise, it helps to have
empathy for the rest of the system and the service quality we’re try‐
ing to uphold.
Another way to look at a promise is as an agreed-upon exchange
that provides value for both parties (like a producer and a con‐
sumer). But how do we go about deciding between two parties what
is valuable and what promises we’d like to agree upon? If nobody
calls our service or gets value from our promises, how useful is the
service? One way of articulating the promises between consumers
and providers is with consumer-driven contracts. With consumer-
driven contracts, we are able to capture the value of our promises
with code or assertions, and as a provider, we can use this knowl‐
edge to test whether we’re upholding our promises.

Distributed Systems Management

At the end of the day, managing a single system is easier than for a
distributed one. If there’s just one machine, and one application
server, and there are problems with the system, we know where to
look. If we need to make a configuration change, upgrade to a spe‐
cific version, or secure it, it’s all in one physical and logical location.
Managing, debugging, and changing it is easier. A single system may
work for some use cases, but for ones where scale is required, we
may look to leverage microservices. As we discussed earlier, how‐
ever, microservices are not free; the trade-off for having flexibility
and scalability is having to manage a complicated system.
When it comes to managing a microservices deployment, here are
some questions to consider:

14 | Chapter 1: Microservices for Java Developers

 • How do we start and stop a fleet of services?
• How do we aggregate logs/metrics/service level agreements
(SLAs) across microservices?
• How do we discover services in an elastic environment where
they can be coming, going, moving, etc.?
• How do we do load balancing?
• How do we learn about the health of our cluster or individual
services?
• How do we restart services that have failed?
• How do we do fine-grained API routing?
• How do we secure our services?
• How do we throttle or disconnect parts of a cluster if it starts to
crash or act unexpectedly?
• How do we deploy multiple versions of a service and route to
them appropriately?
• How do we make configuration changes across a large fleet of
services?
• How do we make changes to our application code and configu‐
ration in a safe, auditable, repeatable manner?

These are not easy problems to solve. The rest of this report will be
devoted to getting Java developers up and running with microservi‐
ces and able to solve some of the problems listed here.

Technology Solutions
Throughout the rest of the report, we’ll introduce you to some pop‐
ular technology components and how they help solve some of the
problems of developing and delivering software using a microservi‐
ces architecture. As touched upon earlier, microservices aren’t just a
technological problem, and getting the right organizational struc‐
ture and teams in place to facilitate this approach is paramount.
Switching from SOAP to REST doesn’t make a microservices archi‐
tecture.
The first step for a Java development team creating microservices is
to get something working locally on their machines. This report will
introduce you to three opinionated Java frameworks for working

Technology Solutions | 15
with microservices: Spring Boot, MicroProfile, and Apache Camel.
Each framework has upsides for different teams, organizations, and
approaches to microservices. As is the norm with technology, some
tools are a better fit for the job or team using them than others. Of
course, these are not the only frameworks to use. There are a couple
that take a reactive approach to microservices, like Vert.x and
Lagom. The mindshift for developing with an event-based model is
a bit different and requires a different learning curve, though, so for
this report we’ll stick with a model that most enterprise Java devel‐
opers will find comfortable.
If you want to know more about reactive programming and reactive
microservices, you can download the free ebook Building Reactive
Microservices in Java by Clement Escoffier from the Red Hat Devel‐
opers website.
The goal of this report is to get you up and running with the basics
for each framework. We’ll dive into a few advanced concepts in the
last chapter, but for the first steps with each framework, we’ll assume
a “Hello World” microservice application. This report is not an all-
encompassing reference for developing microservices; each chapter
ends with links to reference material that you can explore to learn
more as needed. We will iterate on the Hello World application by
creating multiple services and show some simple interaction pat‐
terns.
The final iteration for each framework will look at concepts like bul‐
kheading and promise theory to make services resilient in the face
of faults. We will dig into parts of the NetflixOSS stack, like Hystrix,
that can make our lives easier when implementing this functionality.
We will discuss the pros and cons of this approach and explore what
other options exist.
First, though, let’s take a look at the prerequisites you’ll need to get
started.

Preparing Your Environment

We will be using Java 1.8 for the examples in this report and build‐
ing them with Maven. Please make sure for your environment you
have the following prerequisites installed:

• JDK 1.8

16 | Chapter 1: Microservices for Java Developers

 • Maven 3.5+
• Access to a command-line shell (bash, PowerShell, cmd, Cyg‐
win, etc.)

The Spring ecosystem has some great tools you may wish to use
either at the command line or in an IDE. Most of the examples will
stick to the command line to stay IDE-neutral and because each IDE
has its own way of working with projects. For Spring Boot, we’ll use
the Spring Boot CLI 2.1.x.
Alternative IDEs and tooling for Spring, MicroProfile and Camel
include:

• Spring Tool Suite (Eclipse based IDE)

• Spring Initializr web interface
• Thorntail Project Generator
• Camel Maven Archetypes

Finally, when you build and deploy your microservices as Docker

containers running inside of Kubernetes, you’ll want the following
tools to bootstrap a container environment on your machines:

• Minishift
• Kubernetes/OpenShift CLI
• Docker CLI

Preparing Your Environment | 17

 CHAPTER 2
Spring Boot for Microservices

Spring Boot is an opinionated Java framework for building micro‐

services based on the Spring dependency injection framework.
Spring Boot facilitates creation of microservices through reduced
boilerplate, configuration, and developer friction. This is a similar
approach to the two other frameworks we’ll look at.

Advantages of Spring Boot

Spring Boot offers the following advantages in comparison to the
Spring framework:

• Favoring automatic, conventional configuration by default

• Curating sets of popular starter dependencies for easier con‐
sumption
• Simplifying application packaging
• Baking in application insight (e.g., metrics and environment
info)

Simplified Configuration
Spring historically was a nightmare to configure. Although the
framework improved upon other high-ceremony component mod‐
els (EJB 1.x, 2.x, etc.), it did come along with its own set of heavy‐
weight usage patterns. Namely, Spring required a lot of XML
configuration and a deep understanding of the individual beans

19
needed to construct JdbcTemplates, JmsTemplates, BeanFactory
lifecycle hooks, servlet listeners, and many other components. In
fact, writing a simple “Hello World” with Spring MVC required
understanding of DispatcherServlet and a whole host of Model–
View–Controller classes. Spring Boot aims to eliminate all of this
boilerplate configuration with some implied conventions and sim‐
plified annotations—although, you can still finely tune the underly‐
ing beans if you need to.

Starter Dependencies
Spring was used in large enterprise applications that typically lever‐
aged lots of different technologies to do the heavy lifting: JDBC
databases, message queues, file systems, application-level caching,
etc. Developers often had to stop what they were doing, switch cog‐
nitive contexts, figure out what dependencies belonged to which
piece of functionality (“Oh, I need the JPA dependencies!”), and
spend lots of time sorting out versioning mismatches and other
issues that arose when trying to use these various pieces together.
Spring Boot offers a large collection of curated sets of libraries for
adding these pieces of functionality. These starter modules allow
you to add things like:

• Java Persistence API (JPA)

• NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase
• Redis caching
• Tomcat/Jetty/Undertow servlet engines
• Java Transaction API (JTA)

Adding a submodule to an application brings in a curated set of

transitive dependencies and versions that are known to work
together, saving developers from having to sort out dependencies
themselves.

Application Packaging
Spring Boot really is a set of bootstrap libraries with some conven‐
tion for configurations, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t run a
Spring Boot application inside your existing application servers as a
Web Application Archive (WAR). The idiom that most developers
who use Spring Boot prefer for their applications is the self-

20 | Chapter 2: Spring Boot for Microservices

contained Java Archive (JAR) packaging, where all dependencies
and application code are bundled together with a flat class loader in
a single JAR. This makes it easier to understand application startup,
dependency ordering, and log statements. More importantly, it also
helps reduce the number of moving pieces required to take an app
safely to production. You don’t take an app and chuck it into an app
server; the app, once it’s built, is ready to run as is—standalone—
including embedding its own servlet container if it uses servlets.
That’s right, a simple java -jar <name.jar> is enough to start your
application now! Spring Boot, MicroProfile/Thorntail, and many
other frameworks like Vert.x and Dropwizard all follow this pattern
of packaging everything into an executable uber-AR.
But what about the management things we typically expect out of an
application server?

Production-Ready Features
Spring Boot ships with a module called spring boot actuator that
enables things like metrics and statistics about your application. For
example, you can collect logs, view metrics, perform thread dumps,
show environment variables, understand garbage collection, and
show which beans are configured in the BeanFactory. You can
expose this information via HTTP or Java Management Extensions
(JMX), or you can even log in directly to the process via SSH.
With Spring Boot, you can leverage the power of the Spring frame‐
work and reduce boilerplate configuration and code to more quickly
build powerful, production-ready microservices. Let’s see how.

Getting Started
We’re going to use the Spring Boot command-line interface (CLI) to
bootstrap our first Spring Boot application (the CLI uses Spring Ini‐
tializr under the covers). You are free to explore the different ways to
do this if you’re not comfortable with the CLI. Alternatives include
using Spring Initializr plug-ins for your favorite IDE, or using the
web version. The Spring Boot CLI can be installed a few different
ways, including through package managers and by downloading it
straight from the website. Check for instructions on installing the
CLI most appropriate for your development environment.

Getting Started | 21
Once you’ve installed the CLI tools, you should be able to check the
version of Spring you have:
$ spring --version

Spring CLI v2.1.1.RELEASE

If you can see a version for your installation of the CLI, congrats!
Now navigate to the directory where you want to host your exam‐
ples from the report and run the following command:
$ spring init --build maven --groupId com.redhat.examples \
--version 1.0 --java-version 1.8 --dependencies web \
--name hello-springboot hello-springboot
After running this command, you should have a directory named
hello-springboot with a complete Spring Boot application. If you run
the command and end up with a demo.zip, then just unzip it and
continue. Let’s take a quick look at what those command-line
options are:
--build
The build management tool we want to use. maven and gradle
are the two valid options at this time.
--groupId
The groupId to use in our Maven coordinates for our pom.xml.
Unfortunately this does not properly extend to the Java package
names that get created; these need to be modified by hand.
--version
The version of our application. This will be used in later itera‐
tions, so set to 1.0.
--java-version
The build compiler version for the JDK.
--dependencies
This is an interesting parameter; we can specify fully baked sets
of dependencies for doing common types of development. For
example, web will set up Spring MVC and embed an internal
servlet engine (Tomcat by default, Jetty and Undertow as
options). Other convenient dependency bundles/starters
include jpa, security, and cassandra).
Now, from the hello-springboot directory, try running the following
command:

22 | Chapter 2: Spring Boot for Microservices

 $ mvn spring-boot:run
If everything boots up without any errors, you should see some log‐
ging similar to this:
2018-12-13 13:18:19 --- [main] TomcatWebServer
: Tomcat started on port(s): 8080 (http) with context path ''
2018-12-13 13:18:19 --- [main] HelloSpringbootApplication
: Started HelloSpringbootApplication in 2.3 seconds
(JVM running for 10.265)
Congrats! You have just gotten your first Spring Boot application up
and running. If you navigate to http://localhost:8080 in your
browser, you should see the output shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. Whitelabel error page

This default error page is expected since our application doesn’t do

anything yet. Let’s move on to the next section to add a REST end‐
point to put together a Hello World use case.

Hello World
Now that we have a Spring Boot application that can run, let’s add
some simple functionality. We want to expose an HTTP/REST end‐
point at /api/hello that will return “Hello Spring Boot from X" where
X is the IP address where the service is running. To do this, navigate
to src/main/java/com/examples/hellospringboot. This location should
have been created for you if you followed the preceding steps. Then
create a new Java class called HelloRestController, as shown in
Example 2-1. We’ll add a method named hello() that returns a
string along with the IP address of where the service is running.
You’ll see in Chapter 6, when we discuss load balancing and service

Hello World | 23
discovery, how the host IPs can be used to demonstrate proper fail‐
over, load balancing, etc.

Example 2-1. src/main/java/com/examples/hellospringboot/

HelloRestController.java

public class HelloRestController {

public String hello() {

String hostname = null;
try {
hostname = InetAddress.getLocalHost()
.getHostAddress();
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
hostname = "unknown";
}
return "Hello Spring Boot from " + hostname;
}

Add the HTTP Endpoints

At this point, this piece of code is just a POJO (plain old Java object),
and you could (and should) write a unit test that verifies its behav‐
ior. To expose this as a REST endpoint, we’re going to make use of
the following annotations in Example 2-2:
@RestController
Tells Spring this is an HTTP controller capable of exposing
HTTP endpoints (GET, PUT, POST, etc.)
@RequestMapping
Maps specific parts of the HTTP URI path to classes, methods,
and parameters in the Java code
Note that import statements are omitted.

Example 2-2. src/main/java/com/examples/hellospringboot/

HelloRestController.java

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api")
public class HelloRestController {

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/hello",

produces = "text/plain")

24 | Chapter 2: Spring Boot for Microservices

 public String hello(){
String hostname = null;
try {
hostname = InetAddress.getLocalHost()
.getHostAddress();
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
hostname = "unknown";
}
return "Hello Spring Boot from " + hostname;
}

In this code, all we’ve done is add the aforementioned annotations.

For example, @RequestMapping("/api") at the class level says “map
any method-level HTTP endpoints under this root URI path.” When
we add @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value =
"/hello", produces = "text/plain"), we are telling Spring to
expose an HTTP GET endpoint at /hello (which will really be /api/
hello) and map requests with a media type of Accept: text/plain
to this method. Spring Boot defaults to using an embedded Tomcat
servlet container, but this can be switched to other options like
Undertow or Jetty.
If you build the application and run spring-boot:run again, you
should be able to reach your HTTP endpoint:
$ mvn clean spring-boot:run
Now if you point your browser to http://localhost:8080/api/hello, you
should see a response similar to Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2. Successful hello

What if we want to add some environment-aware configuration to

our application? For example, instead of saying “Hello,” maybe you

Hello World | 25
want to say “Guten Tag” if we deploy our app in production for Ger‐
man users. We need a way to inject properties into our app.

Externalize Configuration
Spring Boot makes it easy to use external property sources like
properties files, command-line arguments, the OS environment, or
Java system properties. We can even bind entire “classes” of proper‐
ties to objects in our Spring context. For example, if we want to bind
all helloapp.* properties to the HelloRestController, we can add
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="helloapp"), and Spring
Boot will automatically try to bind helloapp.foo and helloapp.bar
to Java Bean properties in the HelloRestController class. We can
define new properties in src/main/resources/application.properties.
The application.properties file was automatically created for us when
we created our project. (Note that we could change the filename to
application.yml and Spring would still recognize the YAML file as
the source of properties.)
Let’s add a new property to our src/main/resources/application.prop‐
erties file:
helloapp.saying=Guten Tag aus

Next we add the @ConfigurationProperties annotation and our

new saying field to the HelloRestController class, as shown in
Example 2-3. Note we also need setters.

Example 2-3. src/main/java/com/examples/hellospringboot/

HelloRestController.java

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api")
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="helloapp")
public class HelloRestController {

private String saying;

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/hello",

produces = "text/plain")
public String hello(){
String hostname = null;
try {
hostname = InetAddress.getLocalHost()
.getHostAddress();
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {

26 | Chapter 2: Spring Boot for Microservices

 hostname = "unknown";
}
return saying + " " + hostname;
}

public void setSaying(String saying) {

this.saying = saying;
}
}

Stop the application from running (if you haven’t already) and
restart it:
$ mvn clean spring-boot:run
Now if you navigate to http://localhost:8080/api/hello, you should see
the German version of the saying as shown in Figure 2-3.

Figure 2-3. Successful German greeting

We can now externalize properties that will change depending on

the environment in which we are running. Things like service URIs,
database URIs and passwords, and message queue configurations
would all be great candidates for external configuration. Don’t
overdo it, though; not everything needs to change depending on the
environment! Ideally an application would be configured exactly the
same in all environments, including timeouts, thread pools, retry
thresholds, etc.

Expose Application Metrics and Information

If we want to put this microservice into production, how will we
monitor it? How can we get any insight about how things are run‐
ning? Often our microservices are black boxes unless we explicitly
think through how we want to expose metrics to the outside world.
Fortunately, Spring Boot comes with a prepackaged starter (spring-
boot-starter-actuator) that makes doing this a breeze.

Hello World | 27
Let’s see what it takes to enable the actuator. Open up the pom.xml
file for your hello-springboot microservice and add the following
Maven dependency in the <dependencies>...</dependencies>
section:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
</dependency>
Because we’ve added the actuator dependency, our application now
can expose a lot of information that will be very handy for debug‐
ging or general microservice insight.
Not all endpoints provided by the actuator dependency are exposed
by default, however. We need to manually specify which endpoints
will be exposed.
Add the following property to src/main/resources/application.proper‐
ties to expose some technology-agnostic endpoints:
#Enable management endpoints
management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=
beans,env,health,metrics,httptrace,mappings
Now restart your microservice by stopping it and running:
$ mvn clean spring-boot:run
Try hitting the following URLs and examine what gets returned:

• http://localhost:8080/actuator/beans
• http://localhost:8080/actuator/env
• http://localhost:8080/actuator/health
• http://localhost:8080/actuator/metrics
• http://localhost:8080/actuator/httptrace
• http://localhost:8080/actuator/mappings

Figure 2-4 shows an example of what the http://localhost:8080/env

endpoint looks like.

28 | Chapter 2: Spring Boot for Microservices

Figure 2-4. Actuator response

Exposing runtime insights like this frees up the developer to just

focus on writing code for the microservice that delivers business
value. Delegating the heavy lifting and boilerplate to frameworks is
definitely a good idea.

Running Outside of Maven

Up to this point we’ve been thinking about development and build‐
ing our Hello World microservice from the perspective of a develo‐
per’s laptop using Maven. But what if you want to distribute your
microservice to others or run it in a live environment (development,
QA, production)?
Luckily, with Spring Boot it only takes a few steps to get ready for
shipment and production. Spring Boot prefers atomic, executable
JARs with all dependencies packed into a flat classpath. This means
the JAR that we create as part of a call to mvn clean package is exe‐
cutable and contains all we need to run our microservice in a Java
environment. To test this out, go to the root of the hello-springboot
microservice project and run the following commands:
$ mvn clean package
$ ava -jar target/hello-springboot-1.0.jar
If your project was named demo instead of hello-springboot, then
substitute the properly named JAR file (demo-1.0.jar).
That’s it!
We’ll notice this sort of idiom when we explore MicroProfile in the
next chapter, too.

Calling Another Service

In a microservices environment, each service is responsible for pro‐
viding its functionality or service to other collaborators. As we dis‐
cussed in the first chapter, building distributed systems is hard, and

Calling Another Service | 29

we cannot abstract away the network or the potential for failures.
We will cover how to build resilient interactions with our dependen‐
cies in Chapter 5. In this section, however, we will just focus on get‐
ting a service to talk to a dependent service.
If we wish to extend the hello-springboot microservice, we will need
to create a service that we can call using Spring’s REST client func‐
tionality. For this example and the rest of the examples in the report,
we’ll use a backend service and modify our service to reach out to
the backend to generate the greetings we want to be able to use, as
indicated by Figure 2-5.

Figure 2-5. Calling another service

If you look at the source code for this report, you’ll see a Maven
module called backend that contains a very simple HTTP servlet
that can be invoked with a GET request and query parameters. The
code for this backend is very simple, and it does not use any of the
microservice frameworks (Spring Boot, MicroProfile etc.). We have
created a ResponseDTO object that encapsulates time, ip, and greet
ing fields. We also leverage the awesome Jackson library for JSON
data binding, as seen here:
@WebServlet(urlPatterns = {"/api/backend"})
public class BackendHttpServlet extends HttpServlet {

@Override
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req,
HttpServletResponse resp)
throws ServletException, IOException {
resp.setContentType("application/json");

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

String greeting = req.getParameter("greeting");

ResponseDTO response = new ResponseDTO();

response.setGreeting(greeting +
" from cluster Backend");
response.setTime(System.currentTimeMillis());
response.setIp(getIp());

PrintWriter out = resp.getWriter();

30 | Chapter 2: Spring Boot for Microservices

 mapper.writerWithDefaultPrettyPrinter()
.writeValue(out, response);
}

private String getIp() {

String hostname = null;
try {
hostname = InetAddress
.getLocalHost().getHostAddress();
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
hostname = "unknown";
}
return hostname;
}
}

To start up the backend service on port 8080, navigate to the back‐

end directory and run the following command:
$ mvn wildfly:run
The backend project uses the Maven WildFly plug-in, which allows
us to quickly boot up our app using mvn wildfly:run.
This service is exposed at /api/backend and takes a query parameter
called greeting. For example, when we call this service with the
path /api/backend?greeting=Hello, like this (you can also visit this
URL with your browser):
$ curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/api/backend?greeting=Hello
Then the backend service will respond with a JSON object some‐
thing like this:
{
"greeting" : "Hello from cluster Backend",
"time" : 1459189860895,
"ip" : "172.20.10.3"
}
Next, we’ll create a new HTTP endpoint, /api/greeting, in our hello-
springboot microservice and use Spring to call this backend.
First, we create a class in src/main/java/com/examples/hellospring‐
boot called GreeterRestController and fill it in similarly to how we
filled in the HelloRestController class (see Example 2-4).

Calling Another Service | 31

Example 2-4. src/main/java/com/example/hellospringboot/
GreeterRestController.java

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api")
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="greeting")
public class GreeterRestController {

private String saying;

private String backendServiceHost;

private int backendServicePort;

@RequestMapping(value = "/greeting",
method = RequestMethod.GET, produces = "text/plain")
public String greeting(){
String backendServiceUrl = String.format(
"http://%s:%d/api/backend?greeting={greeting}",
backendServiceHost, backendServicePort);
System.out.println("Sending to: " + backendServiceUrl);
return backendServiceUrl;
}
}

We’ve left out the setters for the properties in this class, but make
sure you have them in your source code! Note that we are using the
@ConfigurationProperties annotation again to configure the
REST controller here, although this time we are using the greeting
prefix. We also create a GET endpoint, like we did with the hello
service; and all it returns at the moment is a string with the values of
the backend service host and port concatenated (these values are
injected in via the @ConfigurationProperties annotation). Let’s
add the backendServiceHost and backendServicePort to our
application.properties file:
greeting.saying=Hello Spring Boot
greeting.backendServiceHost=localhost
greeting.backendServicePort=8080

Next, we’re going to use Spring’s RestTemplate to do the invocation

of the remote service. Following a long-lived Spring convention with
its template patterns, the RestTemplate wraps common HTTP/
REST idioms inside a convenient wrapper abstraction which then
handles all the connections and marshalling/unmarshalling the
results of an invocation. RestTemplate uses the native JDK for

32 | Chapter 2: Spring Boot for Microservices

HTTP/network access, but you can swap that out for Apache
HttpComponents, OkHttp, Netty, or others.
Example 2-5 shows what the source looks like when using the Rest
Template (again, the getters/setters are omitted here, but required).
We are communicating with the backend service by constructing a
URL based on the host and port that have been injected, and we add
a GET query parameter called greeting. The value we send to the
backend service for the greeting parameter is from the saying field
of the GreeterRestController object, which gets injected as part of
the configuration when we add the @ConfigurationProperties
annotation.

Example 2-5. src/main/java/com/example/GreeterRestController.java

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api")
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="greeting")
public class GreeterRestController {

private RestTemplate template = new RestTemplate();

private String saying;

private String backendServiceHost;

private int backendServicePort;

@RequestMapping(value = "/greeting",
method = RequestMethod.GET, produces = "text/plain")
public String greeting(){

String backendServiceUrl = String.format(

"http://%s:%d/api/backend?greeting={greeting}",
backendServiceHost, backendServicePort);

System.out.println("Sending to: " + backendServiceUrl);

BackendDTO response = template.getForObject(

backendServiceUrl, BackendDTO.class, saying);

return response.getGreeting() + " at host: " +

response.getIp();
}
}

Calling Another Service | 33

Next, we add the BackendDTO class, which is used to encapsulate
responses from the backend (Example 2-6).

Example 2-6. src/main/java/com/examples/hellospringboot/

BackendDTO.java

public class BackendDTO {

private String greeting;

private long time;
private String ip;

public String getGreeting() {

return greeting;
}

public void setGreeting(String greeting) {

this.greeting = greeting;
}

public long getTime() {

return time;
}

public void setTime(long time) {

this.time = time;
}

public String getIp() {

return ip;
}

public void setIp(String ip) {

this.ip = ip;
}
}

Now let’s build the microservice and verify that we can call this new
greeting endpoint and that it properly calls the backend. First, start
the backend if it’s not already running. Navigate to the backend
directory of the source code that comes with this application and
run it:
$ mvn clean wildfly:run
Next, we’ll build and run the Spring Boot microservice. Let’s also
configure this service to run on a different port than the default port

34 | Chapter 2: Spring Boot for Microservices

(8080) so that it doesn’t collide with the backend service, which is
already running on port 8080:
$ mvn clean spring-boot:run -Dserver.port=9090
Later in the report we’ll see how running these microservices in
their own Linux container removes the restriction of port swizzling
at runtime.
Now, point your browser to http://localhost:9090/api/greeting to see
if the microservice properly calls the backend and displays what
we’re expecting, as shown in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6. Successful backend

Where to Look Next

In this chapter, you learned what Spring Boot is and how it’s differ‐
ent from traditional WAR/EAR deployments. You also saw some
simple use cases, including exposing an HTTP/REST endpoint,
externalizing configuration, exposing metrics, and calling another
service. This is just scratching the surface; if you’re interested in
learning more about Spring Boot, please take a look at the following
references:

• Spring Boot
• Spring Boot Reference Guide
• Spring Boot in Action, by Craig Walls (Manning)
• Spring Boot on GitHub
• Spring Boot Samples on GitHub

Where to Look Next | 35

 CHAPTER 3
Eclipse MicroProfile for
Microservices

The next Java microservice framework we’ll look at is MicroProfile.

Java Enterprise Edition (EE) (now Jakarta EE) has been the work‐
horse of enterprise Java applications for more than 15 years. Many
enterprises have heavily invested in open source and proprietary
Java EE technologies, and this has affected everything from how
they hire software talent to training, tooling, and management. Java
EE has always been very capable at helping developers build tiered
applications by offering functionality like servlets/JavaServer Pages
(JSPs), transactions, component models, messaging, and persistence.
Despite its popularity, recently the feeling began to grow that Java
EE’s pace of innovation was too slow for a world that demanded
cloud-native applications, microservices, and containers. This feel‐
ing prompted various Java User Groups, Java Champions, vendors,
and corporations to join forces and release the MicroProfile specifi‐
cation.
MicroProfile 1.0, announced during JavaOne 2016, was composed
of the CDI, JSON-P, and JAX-RS specifications from Java EE. These
base APIs allow experienced Java EE developers to utilize their exist‐
ing skill sets for this fast-paced, innovative, and open source specifi‐
cation.
As a specification, there are several MicroProfile implementations:
these include Thorntail from Red Hat, Payara Micro from Payara,

37
TomEE from Apache, and OpenLiberty from IBM, just to name a
few.
Because Java EE had a strong influence on MicroProfile, it is worth
mentioning that in 2017, Oracle donated Java EE to the Eclipse
Foundation under the Jakarta EE brand. Although Jakarta EE and
MicroProfile share the same origin, their purpose remains very dif‐
ferent. While Jakarta EE is a continuation of Java EE and focuses on
enterprise applications, MicroProfile instead focuses on Enterprise
microservices applications.
The MicroProfile 2.1 specification defines the base programming
model using the Jakarta EE CDI, JSON-P, JAX-RS, and JSON-B
APIs, and adds Open Tracing, Open API, Rest Client, Config, Fault
Tolerance, Metrics, JWT Propagation, and Health Check APIs (see
Figure 3-1). Development remains active, with groups working on
Reactive Streams, Reactive Messaging, GraphQL, long running
actions, and service mesh features.

Figure 3-1. MicroProfile 2.1 APIs

Thorntail
Thorntail is the MicroProfile implementation from Red Hat. It is a
complete teardown of the WildFly application server into bite-sized,
reusable components that can be assembled and formed into a
microservice application. Assembling these components is as simple
as including a dependency in your Java Maven (or Gradle) build file;
Thorntail takes care of the rest.

38 | Chapter 3: Eclipse MicroProfile for Microservices

Thorntail evaluates your pom.xml (or Gradle) file and determines
what dependencies your microservice actually uses (e.g., CDI,
OpenTracing, and Metrics), and then builds an uber-JAR (just like
Spring Boot and Dropwizard) that includes the minimal APIs and
implementations necessary to run your service.
Besides the MicroProfile API, Thorntail provides many other func‐
tionalities. Some components provide only access to other APIs,
such as JPA or JMS; other components provide higher-level capabili‐
ties, such as integration with Infinispan.

Getting Started
You can start a new Thorntail project by using the Thorntail Gener‐
ator web console to bootstrap it (similar to Spring Initializr for
Spring Boot). Simply open the page and fill in the fields with the fol‐
lowing values, as shown in Figure 3-2:

• Group ID: com.redhat.examples

• Artifact ID: hello-microprofile
• Dependencies: MicroProfile Config, JAX-RS

Figure 3-2. Thorntail Generator

Now click the blue Generate Project button. This will cause a file
called hello-microprofile.zip to be downloaded. Save the file and
extract it.
Navigate to the hello-microprofile directory, and try running the fol‐
lowing command:
$ mvn thorntail:run

Make sure that you have stopped the backend service that you
started in the previous chapter.

Getting Started | 39
If everything boots up without any errors, you should see some log‐
ging similar to this:
2018-12-14 15:23:54,119 INFO [org.jboss.as.server] (main)
WFLYSRV0010: Deployed "demo.war" (runtime-name : "demo.war")
2018-12-14 15:23:54,129 INFO [org.wildfly.swarm] (main)
THORN99999: Thorntail is Ready
Congrats! You have just gotten your first MicroProfile application
up and running. If you navigate to http://localhost:8080/hello in your
browser, you should see the output shown in Figure 3-3.

Figure 3-3. Hello from Thorntail

Hello World
Just like with the Spring Boot framework in the preceding chapter,
we want to add some basic “Hello World” functionality and then
incrementally add more functionality on top of it.
We want to expose an HTTP/REST endpoint at /api/hello that will
return “Hello MicroProfile from X,” where X is the IP address where
the service is running. To do this, navigate to src/main/java/com/
examples/hellomicroprofile/rest. This location should have been cre‐
ated for you if you followed the preceding steps. Then create a new
Java class called HelloRestController, as shown in Example 3-1.
We’ll add a method named hello() that returns a string along with
the IP address of where the service is running. You’ll see in Chap‐
ter 6, in the sections on load balancing and service discovery, how
the host IPs can be used to demonstrate proper failover, load balanc‐
ing, etc.

40 | Chapter 3: Eclipse MicroProfile for Microservices

Example 3-1. src/main/java/com/examples/hellomicroprofile/rest/
HelloRestController.java

public class HelloRestController {

public String hello() {

String hostname = null;
try {
hostname = InetAddress.getLocalHost()
.getHostAddress();
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
hostname = "unknown";
}
return "Hello MicroProfile from " + hostname;
}

Add the HTTP Endpoints

You might have noticed that the POJO class HelloRestController
in the MicroProfile project has exactly the same implementation as
the HelloRestController class in the Spring Boot project. The only
exception will be the HTTP endpoint annotations, which we add in
Example 3-2:
@Path
Maps specific parts of the HTTP URI path to classes and meth‐
ods.
@GET
Specifies that any HTTP GET method will invoke the annotated
method. The method won’t be called if the path is the same but
the HTTP method is anything other than GET.
@Produces
Specifies the MIME type of the response.
Again, note that import statements are omitted in the following
example.

Example 3-2. src/main/java/com/examples/hellospringboot/

HelloRestController.java

@Path("/api")
public class HelloRestController {

Hello World | 41
 @GET
@Produces("text/plain")
@Path("/hello")
public String hello() {
String hostname = null;
try {
hostname = InetAddress.getLocalHost()
.getHostAddress();
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
hostname = "unknown";
}
return "Hello MicroProfile from " + hostname;
}

In this code, all we’ve done is add the aforementioned annotations.

For example, @Path("/api") at the class level says “map any
method-level HTTP endpoints under this root URI path.” When we
add @Path("/hello") and @GET, we are telling MicroProfile to
expose an HTTP GET endpoint at /hello (which will really be /api/
hello). The annotation @Produces("text/plain") maps requests
with a media type of Accept: text/plain to this method.
If you build the application and run thorntail:run again, you
should be able to reach the HTTP endpoint:
$ mvn clean thorntail:run
Now if you point your browser to http://localhost:8080/api/hello, you
should see a response similar to the one shown in Figure 3-4.

Figure 3-4. Successful hello

Now, the same way as we did for Spring Boot, we will see how to
inject external properties into our app using MicroProfile’s Config
API.

42 | Chapter 3: Eclipse MicroProfile for Microservices

Externalize Configuration
Like Spring Boot, MicroProfile defines a mechanism to externalize
configuration. It uses different ConfigSources to consume configu‐
ration from system properties, environment variables, or even from
a META-INF/microprofile-config.properties file. Each of these sour‐
ces has a different priority, so configuration values can be overwrit‐
ten.
To see how simple it is to consume external configuration, let’s add a
new property to our src/main/resources/META-INF/microprofile-
config.properties file (remember to create the folder structure and
the file if they don’t exist):
helloapp.saying=Guten Tag aus

Now, as shown in Example 3-3, let’s add the @Inject and @Config
Property("helloapp.saying") annotations and our new saying
field to the HelloRestController class. Note that, unlike with
Spring Boot, we don’t need setters or getters.

Example 3-3. src/main/java/com/examples/hellomicroprofile/

HelloRestController.java

@Path("/api")
public class HelloRestController {

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name="helloapp.saying")
private String saying;

@GET
@Produces("text/plain")
@Path("/hello")
public String hello() {
String hostname = null;
try {
hostname = InetAddress.getLocalHost()
.getHostAddress();
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
hostname = "unknown";
}
return saying + " " + hostname;
}

Hello World | 43
Because we’ve started using the CDI API in our examples, we’ll also
need to add the beans.xml file, with the contents shown in
Example 3-4.

Example 3-4. src/main/resources/META-INF/beans.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<beans
xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_1.xsd"
bean-discovery-mode="all">
</beans>

This file will instruct the CDI API to process all the injection points
marked with the @Inject annotation.
Let’s stop our application from running (if we haven’t) and restart it:
$ mvn clean thorntail:run
Now if we navigate to http://localhost:8080/api/hello we should see
the German version of the saying, as shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 3-5. Successful German hello

Expose Application Metrics and Information

Another similarity with Spring Boot is the ability of MicroProfile
applications to expose endpoints that can be used to monitor our
applications. To enable this, we need to add the MicroProfile Met‐
rics dependency to our pom.xml file.
Open up the pom.xml file for the hello-microprofile microservice and
add the following Maven dependency within the <dependencies>…
</dependencies> section:

44 | Chapter 3: Eclipse MicroProfile for Microservices

 <dependency>
<groupId>io.thorntail</groupId>
<artifactId>microprofile-metrics</artifactId>
</dependency>
Adding this dependency will cause the application to expose a lot of
information that will be very handy for debugging and general
insight.
Now stop your microservice and restart it by running:
$ mvn clean thorntail:run
Try hitting the URL http://localhost:8080/metrics and examine what
gets returned. You should see something like the result in
Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-6. MicroProfile metrics

Hello World | 45
Easy, right?

Running Outside of Maven

Remember how easy it was to run Spring Boot outside Maven?
Luckily, with MicroProfile it just takes the exact same few steps to
get a microservice ready for shipment and production.
Just like Spring Boot, MicroProfile prefers atomic, executable JARs
with all dependencies packed into a flat classpath. This means the
JAR that we create as part of a call to mvn clean package is exe‐
cutable and contains all we need to run our microservice in a Java
environment! To test this out, go to the root of the hello-microprofile
microservice project and run the following commands:
$ mvn clean package
$ java -jar target/demo-thorntail.jar
That’s it! Exactly the same approach used by Spring Boot.

Calling Another Service

In a microservices environment, each service is responsible for pro‐
viding its functionality or service to other collaborators. If we wish
to extend the hello_microprofile microservice, we will need to create
a service that we can call using JAX-RS client functionality. Just like
we did for the Spring Boot microservice, we’ll leverage the backend
service from the source code that accompanies this report. The
interaction will look similar to Figure 3-7.

Figure 3-7. Calling another service

If you look at the source code for this report, you’ll see a Maven
module called backend which contains a very simple HTTP servlet
that can be invoked with a GET request and query parameters. The
code for this backend is very simple, and it does not use any of the
microservice frameworks (Spring Boot, MicroProfile, etc.).
To start up the backend service on port 8080, navigate to the back‐
end directory and run the following:

46 | Chapter 3: Eclipse MicroProfile for Microservices

 $ mvn clean wildfly:run
Remember that the hello-microprofile service should be stopped
before running the backend service.
This service is exposed at /api/backend and takes a query parameter
called greeting. For example, when we call this service with the
path /api/backend?greeting=Hello, like this (you can also visit this
URL with your browser):
$ curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/api/backend?greeting=Hello
We get back a JSON object like this:
{
"greeting" : "Hello from cluster Backend",
"time" : 1459189860895,
"ip" : "172.20.10.3"
}
Next, we’ll create a new HTTP endpoint, /api/greeting, in our hello-
microprofile microservice and use the JAX-RS Client API to call this
backend.
First, we create a new class in src/main/java/com/examples/hellomi‐
croprofile called GreeterRestController and fill it in similarly to
how we filled in the HelloRestController class (see Example 3-5).

Example 3-5. src/main/java/com/example/hellomicroprofile/rest/

GreeterRestController.java

@Path("/api")
public class GreeterRestController {

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name="greeting.saying", defaultValue = "Hello")
private String saying;

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name = "greeting.backendServiceHost",
defaultValue = "localhost")
private String backendServiceHost;

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name = "greeting.backendServicePort",
defaultValue = "8080")
private int backendServicePort;

@GET

Calling Another Service | 47

 @Produces("text/plain")
@Path("greeting")
public String greeting() {

String backendServiceUrl = String.format("http://%s:%d",

backendServiceHost,backendServicePort);

return "Sending to: " + backendServiceUrl

}

We’ve created a simple JAX-RS resource here that exposes an /api/

greeting endpoint that just returns the value of the
backendServiceUrl field. Also note that we’re injecting the backend
host and port as environment variables that have default values if no
environment variables are set. Again, we’re using MicroProfile Con‐
fig’s @ConfigProperty annotation to accomplish this.
Let’s also add the BackendDTO class, shown in Example 3-6, which is
used to encapsulate responses from the backend.

Example 3-6. src/main/java/com/examples/hellomicroprofile/

BackendDTO.java

public class BackendDTO {

private String greeting;

private long time;
private String ip;

public String getGreeting() {

return greeting;
}

public void setGreeting(String greeting) {

this.greeting = greeting;
}

public long getTime() {

return time;
}

public void setTime(long time) {

this.time = time;
}

public String getIp() {

return ip;

48 | Chapter 3: Eclipse MicroProfile for Microservices

 }

public void setIp(String ip) {

this.ip = ip;
}
}

Next, let’s add our JAX-RS client implementation to communicate

with the backend service. It should look like Example 3-7.

Example 3-7. src/main/java/com/example/hellospringboot/

GreeterRestController.java

@Path("/api")
public class GreeterRestController {

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name="greeting.saying", defaultValue = "Hello")
private String saying;

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name = "greeting.backendServiceHost",
defaultValue = "localhost")
private String backendServiceHost;

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name = "greeting.backendServicePort",
defaultValue = "8080")
private int backendServicePort;

@GET
@Produces("text/plain")
@Path("greeting")
public String greeting() {
String backendServiceUrl = String.format("http://%s:%d",
backendServiceHost,backendServicePort);

System.out.println("Sending to: " + backendServiceUrl);

Client client = ClientBuilder.newClient();

BackendDTO backendDTO = client.target(backendServiceUrl)
.path("api")
.path("backend")
.queryParam("greeting", saying)
.request(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE)
.get(BackendDTO.class);

return backendDTO.getGreeting()
+ " at host: " + backendDTO.getIp();
}

Calling Another Service | 49

}

Now let’s build the microservice and verify that we can call this new
greeting endpoint and that it properly calls the backend. We’ll con‐
figure this service to run on a different port than the default (8080)
so that it doesn’t collide with the backend service, which is already
running on that port:
$ mvn thorntail:run \
-Dswarm.network.socket-binding-groups.standard-sockets
.port-offset=100
In Chapter 6, we’ll see how running these microservices in their own
Linux containers removes the restriction of port swizzling at run‐
time. With all that done, you can point your browser to http://local‐
host:8180/api/greeting to see if our microservice properly calls the
backend and displays what we’re expecting, as shown in Figure 3-8.

Figure 3-8. Successful backend

Where to Look Next

In this chapter, you learned about the MicroProfile specification and
its Thorntail implementation. You also learned how to expose REST
endpoints, configuration, and metrics and make calls to external
services. This was meant as a quick introduction to Thorntail and is
by no means a comprehensive guide. Check out the following links
for more information:

• MicroProfile
• MicroProfile slides
• Thorntail
• Thorntail Documentation

50 | Chapter 3: Eclipse MicroProfile for Microservices

• Thorntail Project Generator

Where to Look Next | 51

 CHAPTER 4
API Gateway with Apache Camel

Now that you know how to build microservices, you could continue
building more and more. However, as the number of microservices
grows, the complexity for the client who is consuming these APIs
also grows.
Real applications could have dozens or even hundreds of microser‐
vices. A simple process like buying a book from an online store like
Amazon can cause a client (your web browser or your mobile app)
to use several other microservices. A client that has direct access to
the microservice would have to locate and invoke them and handle
any failures they caused itself. So, usually a better approach is to hide
those services behind a new service layer. This aggregator service
layer is known as an API gateway.
Another advantage of using an API gateway is that you can add
cross-cutting concerns like authorization and data transformation in
this layer. Services that use non-internet-friendly protocols can also
benefit from the usage of an API gateway. However, keep in mind
that it usually isn’t recommended to have a single API gateway for
all the microservices in your application. If you (wrongly) decided
to take that approach, it would act just like a monolithic bus, violat‐
ing microservice independence by coupling all the microservices.
Adding business logic to an API gateway is a mistake and should be
avoided.

53
Apache Camel
Apache Camel is an open source integration framework that is well
suited to implementing API gateways. The framework implements
most of the patterns for enterprise application integration (EAI)
described in the book Enterprise Integration Patterns, by Gregor
Hohpe and Bobby Woolf (Addison-Wesley). Each enterprise inte‐
gration pattern (EIP) describes a solution for a common design
problem that occurs repeatedly in many integration projects. The
book documents 65 EIPs, taking a technology-agnostic approach.
Apache Camel uses a consistent API based on EIPs to have a well-
defined programming model for integration. With over 200 compo‐
nents, the developer can connect Apache Camel to almost any
source/destination. In addition to HTTP, FTP, File, JPA, SMTP, and
Websocket components, there are even components for platforms
like Twitter, Facebook, AWS, etc.
Apache Camel is very powerful, yet very simple to use. This makes it
an ideal choice for creating the API gateway for our microservices.
Apache Camel can be executed as a standalone application or be
embedded in a existing application. For our API gateway example,
we will use Camel in a Spring Boot application.

Getting Started
Camel applications can be created by declaring the Maven depen‐
dencies in an existing application, or by using an existing Maven
Archetype.
Since we already showed how to use the Spring CLI to create the
hello-springboot application, this time we will use the Maven Arche‐
type approach.
The following command will create the Spring Boot application with
Camel in a directory named api-gateway:
$ mvn archetype:generate -B \
-DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.camel.archetypes \
-DarchetypeArtifactId=camel-archetype-spring-boot \
-DgroupId=com.redhat.examples \
-DartifactId=api-gateway \
-Dversion=1.0

54 | Chapter 4: API Gateway with Apache Camel

From the api-gateway directory, try running the following com‐
mand:
$ mvn spring-boot:run
If everything boots up without any errors, you should see some log‐
ging similar to this:
2018-12-18 INFO 782 --- [main] MySpringBootApplication
:Started MySpringBootApplication in 3.5 seconds
(JVM running for 6.866)
Hello World
Hello World
Hello World
Hello World

Note that Hello World will be printed in the console every two sec‐
onds.

Building the API Gateway

Now that we have a Spring Boot application that can run Camel
routes, let’s change the functionality that prints Hello World every
two seconds to call the hello-springboot and hello-microprofile
microservices.
When we deploy our microservices in a Kubernetes cluster in the
next chapter, the only microservice that will be exposed to the out‐
side world will be this API gateway. The API gateway will call hello-
springboot and hello-microprofile, which will call the backend.
Figure 4-1 shows the overall architecture of our microservices and
their interaction.

Figure 4-1. Calling another service

Before we start modifying our code, we need to declare the depen‐

dencies that we will use to connect to our microservices using the

Building the API Gateway | 55

HttpClient v4 library, the servlet to register the REST endpoints, and
the JSON library to marshal the result.
Open up the pom.xml file for the api-gateway microservice and add
the following Maven dependency in the <dependencies>...</
dependencies> section:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
<artifactId>camel-http4-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
<artifactId>camel-servlet-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
<artifactId>camel-jackson-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>

Next, we’ll modify the MySpringBootRouter class to connect to both

microservices as shown in Example 4-1. We have already learned
that the @ConfigurationProperties(prefix="gateway") annota‐
tion connects the gateway string property to this class. The @Compo
nent annotation makes Spring Boot find and register this class as a
Spring Bean. Later, Camel will look for every Spring Bean that
extends the class RouteBuilder to be used to configure the Camel
routes using the method configure().

Example 4-1. src/main/java/com/redhat/examples/

MySpringBootRouter.java

@Component
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="gateway")
public class MySpringBootRouter extends RouteBuilder {

private String springbootsvcurl, microprofilesvcurl;

private static final String REST_ENDPOINT=

"http4:%s/api/greeting?httpClient.connectTimeout=1000"
+
"&bridgeEndpoint=true
+
&copyHeaders=true +

&connectionClose=true";

@Override

56 | Chapter 4: API Gateway with Apache Camel

 public void configure() {
from("direct:microprofile").streamCaching()
.toF(REST_ENDPOINT, microprofilesvcurl)
.log("Response from MicroProfile microservice:
${body}")
.convertBodyTo(String.class)
.end();

from("direct:springboot").streamCaching()
.toF(REST_ENDPOINT, springbootsvcurl)
.log("Response from Spring Boot microservice: +
${body}")
.convertBodyTo(String.class)
.end();

rest()
.get("/gateway").enableCORS(true)
.route()
.multicast(AggregationStrategies.flexible()
.accumulateInCollection(ArrayList.class))
.parallelProcessing()
.to("direct:microprofile")
.to("direct:springboot")
.end()
.marshal().json(JsonLibrary.Jackson)
.convertBodyTo(String.class)
.endRest();
}

public void setSpringbootsvcurl(String springbootsvcurl) {

this.springbootsvcurl = springbootsvcurl;
}

public void setMicroprofilesvcurl(String microprofilesvcurl) {

this.microprofilesvcurl = microprofilesvcurl;
}

The from("direct:...") method in the MySpringBootRouter class

declares a connector to the hello-microprofile and hello-springboot
microservices. The URI used by this Camel connector is specified by
the string declared in the REST_ENDPOINT final variable. The format
http4:_hostname_[:_port_][/_resourceUri_][_?options_] is
documented in the reference page for the HTTP4 Camel compo‐
nent.
After we have declared the destination routes direct:microprofile
and direct:springboot, we declare our REST entry point using the

Building the API Gateway | 57

method rest(). The method is followed by the verb get("/gate
way"), which specifies what HTTP method and path this endpoint
expects. This rest method also enables cross-origin resource sharing
(CORS), which allows this endpoint to receive requests from a
server on a different origin (domain).
Next, the REST request is routed via multicast to both routes using
parallel processing, and the results are accumulated in an ArrayList
collection. This is specified in the route(), multicast(), and paral
lelProcessing() methods. Finally, the result is marshaled into
JSON format using the Jackson library in the .marshal().json
(JsonLibrary.Jackson) method.
The Camel Fluent API is very flexible yet makes the code very
expressive. With less than 20 lines of code, we just built a REST end‐
point that connects to other microservices in parallel, collects the
results, and transforms them to JSON.

Configuring the API Gateway

The API gateway needs to connect to hello-microprofile and hello-
springboot. The addresses of these microservices must not be hard‐
coded and should be configured externally. For that reason, we used
the variables springbootsvcurl and microprofilesvcurl to pro‐
vide those “service URLs.”
Another configuration that we need provide to our application is the
context path that Camel will use for the REST endpoints. By default,
Camel will bind the REST endpoints to /camel/*, but we want to
use /api/* instead. For that reason, we will also configure the prop‐
erty camel.component.servlet.mapping.context-path in the src/
main/resources/application.properties file.
Let’s add all these properties to that file now:
gateway.springbootsvcurl=localhost:8180
gateway.microprofilesvcurl=localhost:8280

# to reconfigure the camel servlet context-path mapping

# to use /api/* instead of /camel/*
camel.component.servlet.mapping.context-path=/api/*

58 | Chapter 4: API Gateway with Apache Camel

Calling All Microservices
Now that our API gateway is ready, we will start all four microservi‐
ces locally using different ports:

• backend: 8080
• hello-springboot: 8180
• hello-microprofile: 8280
• api-gateway: 8380

To start up the backend service on port 8080, navigate to the backend

directory and run the following:
$ mvn clean wildfly:run

To start up the hello-springboot service on port 8180, navigate to the

hello-springboot directory and run the following:
$ mvn clean spring-boot:run -Dserver.port=8180

To start up the hello-microprofile service on port 8280, navigate to

the hello-microprofile directory and run the following:
$ mvn thorntail:run \
-Dswarm.network.socket-binding-groups.standard-sockets
.port-offset=200

Finally, start the api-gateway service on port 8380. Navigate to the

api-gateway directory and run the following:
$ mvn spring-boot:run -Dserver.port=8380
Now, point your browser to http: //localhost:8380/api/gateway to
verify that the API gateway calls the two microservices and aggre‐
gates both responses in a JSON array, as shown in Figure 4-2.

Figure 4-2. Successful API gateway

Where to Look Next

In this chapter, you learned about Apache Camel and the API gate‐
way pattern. You also learned how to expose REST endpoints, con‐

Where to Look Next | 59

figure Apache Camel routes, and make calls to external services.
This was meant as a quick introduction to Apache Camel and is by
no means a comprehensive guide. Check out the following links for
more information:

• Apache Camel
• Camel components
• Camel Maven Archetypes
• Camel Spring Boot
• API gateway pattern

60 | Chapter 4: API Gateway with Apache Camel

 CHAPTER 5
Deploying Microservices at Scale
with Docker and Kubernetes

In the previous chapters we first talked about microservices at a

high level, covering organizational agility, designing with depend‐
ency thinking, domain-driven design, and promise theory, then we
took a deep dive into the weeds with three popular Java frameworks
for developing microservices: Spring Boot, MicroProfile/Thorntail,
and Apache Camel. We saw how we can leverage the powerful out-
of-the-box capabilities these frameworks provide easily by exposing
and consuming REST endpoints, utilizing environment configura‐
tion options, packaging as all-in-one executable JAR files, and
exposing metrics. These concepts all revolve around a single
instance of a microservice. But what happens when you need to
manage dependencies, get consistent startup and shutdown behav‐
ior, do health checks, and load balance your microservices at scale?
In this chapter, we’re going to discuss those high-level concepts so
you understand more about the challenges of deploying microservi‐
ces, regardless of language, at scale.
When we start to break out applications and services into microser‐
vices, we end up with more moving pieces by definition: we have
more services, more binaries, more configuration, more interaction
points, etc. We’ve traditionally dealt with deploying Java applications
by building binary artifacts (JARs, WARs, and EARs), staging them
somewhere (shared disks, JIRAs, and artifact repositories), opening
a ticket, and hoping the operations team deploys them into an appli‐
cation server as we intended, with the correct permissions and envi‐

61
ronment variables and configurations. We also deploy our
application servers in clusters with redundant hardware, load bal‐
ancers, and shared disks and try to keep things from failing as much
as possible. We may have built some automation around the infra‐
structure that supports this with great tools like Chef or Ansible, but
somehow deploying applications still tends to be fraught with mis‐
takes, configuration drift, and unexpected behaviors.
With this model, we do a lot of hoping, which tends to break down
quickly in current environments (never mind at scale). Is the appli‐
cation server configured in dev/QA/prod like it is on our machine?
If it’s not, have we completely captured the changes that need to be
made and expressed to the operations folks? Do any of our changes
impact other applications also running in the same application
server(s)? Are the runtime components like the operating system,
Java virtual machine (JVM), and associated dependencies exactly the
same as on our development machine? The JVM that runs an appli‐
cation is an implementation detail that’s highly coupled to how we
configure and tune the application, so variations across environ‐
ments can wreak havoc. When you start to deliver microservices, do
you run them in separate processes on traditional servers? Is process
isolation enough? What happens if one JVM goes berserk and takes
over 100% of the CPU? Or the network I/O? Or a shared disk? What
if all of the services running on that host crash? Are your applica‐
tions designed to accommodate that? As we split our applications
into smaller pieces, these issues become magnified.

Immutable Delivery
Immutable delivery concepts help us reason about these problems.
With immutable delivery, we try to reduce the number of moving
pieces into prebaked images as part of the build process. For exam‐
ple, imagine in your build process you could output a fully baked
image consisting of the operating system, the intended version of
the JVM, any sidecar applications, and all the configuration. You
could then deploy this in one environment, test it, and migrate it
along a delivery pipeline toward production without worrying about
whether the environment or application is configured consistently.
If you needed to make a change to your application, you could sim‐
ply rerun this pipeline to produce a new immutable image of the
application and then do a rolling upgrade to deliver it. If it didn’t
work, you could roll the change back by deploying the previous

62 | Chapter 5: Deploying Microservices at Scale with Docker and Kubernetes

image. No more worrying about configuration or environment drift
or whether things were properly restored on a rollback.
This sounds great, but how do we do it? Executable JARs get us part
of the way there, but fall short. The JVM is an implementation detail
of our microservice, so how do we bundle the JVM? JVMs are writ‐
ten in native code and have native OS-level dependencies that we’ll
need to package, along with configuration, environment variables,
permissions, file directories, and other things. All of these details
cannot be captured within a single executable JAR. Other binary
formats, like virtual machine images, can properly encapsulate these
details. However, for each microservice that may have different
packaging requirements (JVM? Node.js? Golang? properties files?
private keys?), we could easily see an explosion of VM images and
combinations of language runtimes. If you automate this with infra‐
structure as code and have access to infrastructure as a service with
properly exposed APIs, you can certainly accomplish this. In fact,
building up VMs as part of an automated delivery pipeline is exactly
what Netflix did to achieve this level of immutable delivery. But it
can be hard to manage, patch, and change multiple VMs, each of
which virtualizes an entire machine with required device drivers,
operating systems, and management tooling.
What other lightweight packaging and image formats can we
explore?

Docker and Linux Containers

Docker came along a few years ago with an elegant solution to
immutable delivery. Docker allows us to package our applications
with all of the dependencies they need (OS, JVM, other application
dependencies, etc.) in a lightweight, layered image format. It uses
these images to run instances that run our applications inside Linux
containers with isolated CPU, memory, network, and disk usage. In
a way, these containers are a form of application virtualization or
process virtualization. They allow a process to execute while thinking
it’s the only thing running (e.g., list processes with ps and you see
only your application’s process there) and that it has full access to
the CPUs, memory, disk, network, and other resources, when in
reality, it doesn’t. Each application can only use the resources it’s
allocated. For example, I can start a Docker container with a slice of
CPU, a segment of memory, and limits on how much network I/O it

Docker and Linux Containers | 63

can perform. From outside the Linux container, on the host, the
application just looks like another process. No virtualization of
device drivers, operating systems, or network stacks, no special
hypervisors—it’s just a process. This fact also means we can get even
more applications running on a single set of hardware for higher
density without the overhead of additional operating systems and
other pieces of a VM that would be required to achieve similar isola‐
tion qualities.
What’s happening under the covers is nothing revolutionary either.
Features called cgroups, namespaces, and chroot, which have been
built into the Linux kernel for some time, are used to create the
appearance of this application virtualization. Linux containers have
been around for over 10 years, and process virtualization existed in
Solaris and FreeBSD even before that. Traditionally, using these
underlying Linux primitives, or even higher-level abstractions like
lxc, was complicated at best. Then Docker came along and simpli‐
fied the API and user experience around Linux containers. Its client
CLI that can easily spin up these containers based on the Docker
image format, which has now been opened up to the larger commu‐
nity in the Open Container Initiative (OCI). This ease of use and
image format are changing the way we package and deliver software.
Once we have an image, spinning up many Linux containers
becomes trivial. The layers are built as deltas between a base image
(e.g., RHEL, Debian, or some other Linux operating system) and the
application files. Distributing new applications just distributes the
new layers on top of existing base layers. This makes distributing
images much easier than shuttling around bloated cloud machine
images. Also, if a vulnerability (Shellshock, Heartbleed, etc.) is
found in the base image, that image can be rebuilt without having to
try to patch each and every VM. This makes it easy to run a con‐
tainer anywhere: containers can be moved from a developer’s desk‐
top to dev, QA, or production in a portable way without having to
manually ensure or hope that all of the correct dependencies are in
the right place (does this application use JVM 1.6, 1.7, or 1.8?). If we
need to redeploy with a change (new app) or fix a base image, doing
so just changes the layers in the image that require changes.
When we have standard APIs and open formats, we can build tool‐
ing that doesn’t have to know or care what’s running in the con‐
tainer. How do we start an application? How do we stop it? How do
we do health checking? How do we aggregate logs, metrics, and

64 | Chapter 5: Deploying Microservices at Scale with Docker and Kubernetes

insight? We can build or leverage tooling that does all of these things
in a technology-agnostic way. Service discovery, load balancing,
fault tolerance, configuration, and more can also be pushed to lower
layers in the application stack so that application developers don’t
have to try to cobble all this together by hand and complicate their
application code.

Kubernetes
Google is known for running Linux containers at scale. In 2014,
Google engineer Joe Beda said the company started more than two
billion containers per week. In fact, “everything” running at Google
runs in Linux containers, and it’s all managed by their Borg cluster
management platform. Google even had a hand in creating the
underlying Linux technology that makes containers possible: in
2006 its engineers started working on “process containers,” which
eventually became cgroups and was merged into the Linux kernel
code base and released in 2008. With its breadth and background of
operating containers at scale, it’s no surprise Google has had a
strong influence on platforms built around containers. Here are just
a few examples:

• The original Cloud Foundry creators (Derek Collison and

Vadim Spivak) worked at Google and spent several years using
Google’s Borg cluster management solution.
• Apache Mesos was created for a PhD thesis, and its creator (Ben
Hindman) interned at Google and had many conversations with
Google engineers around container clustering, scheduling, and
management.
• The Kubernetes container cluster management platform was
originally created by the same engineers who built Borg at Goo‐
gle; it was open sourced back in 2013 when Docker rocked the
technology industry.

Today, the Kubernetes community is large, open, and rapidly grow‐

ing with contributors from Google, Red Hat, CoreOS, and many
other organizations (and lots of independent individuals!). Kuber‐
netes brings a lot of functionality for running clusters of microservi‐
ces inside Linux containers at scale. Google has packaged over a
decade of experience into Kubernetes, and being able to leverage
this knowledge and functionality for our own microservices deploy‐

Kubernetes | 65
ments is game-changing. The web-scale companies have been doing
this for years, and a lot of them (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) had to hand-
build much of the functionality that Kubernetes now has baked in.
Kubernetes has a handful of simple primitives that you should
understand before we dig into examples. In this chapter we’ll intro‐
duce you to these concepts, and in the following chapter we’ll make
use of them for managing a cluster of microservices.

Pods
A pod is a grouping of one or more Docker containers (like a pod of
whales?). A typical deployment of a pod, however, will often be one-
to-one with a Docker container. If you have sidecar, ambassador, or
adapter deployments that must always be colocated with the applica‐
tion, a pod is the way to group them. This abstraction is also a way
to guarantee container affinity (i.e., Docker container A will always
be deployed alongside Docker container B on the same host).
Kubernetes orchestrates, schedules, and manages pods. When we
refer to an application running inside of Kubernetes, it’s running
within a Docker container inside of a pod. A pod is given its own IP
address, and all containers within the pod share this address (which
is different from plain Docker, where each container gets an IP
address). When volumes are mounted to the pod, they are also
shared between the individual Docker containers running in the
pod.
One last thing to know about pods: they are fungible. This means
they can disappear at any time (either because the service crashed or
because the cluster killed it). They are not like VMs, which you care
for and nurture. Pods can be destroyed at any point. This falls within
our expectation in a microservice world that things will (and do)
fail, so we are strongly encouraged to write our microservices with
this premise in mind. This is an important distinction to keep in
mind as we talk about some of the other concepts in the following
sections.

Labels
Labels are simple key/value pairs that we can assign to pods, like
release=stable or tier=backend. Pods (and other resources, but
we’ll focus on pods) can have multiple labels that group and catego‐
rize them in a loosely coupled fashion, making it easier to build

66 | Chapter 5: Deploying Microservices at Scale with Docker and Kubernetes

powerful clusters at scale. After we’ve labeled our pods, we can use
label selectors to find which pods belong in which group. For exam‐
ple, if we had some pods labeled tier=backend and others labeled
tier=frontend, using a label selector expression of tier != front
end we could select all of the pods that are not labeled “frontend.”
Label selectors are used under the covers for the next two concepts:
replication controllers and services.

ReplicationControllers and Deployments

When talking about running microservices at scale, we will probably
be talking about multiple instances of any given microservice.
Kubernetes has a concept called the ReplicationController that
manages the number of replicas for a given set of microservices. For
example, let’s say we wanted to manage the number of pods labeled
with tier=backend and release=stable. We could define a Repli
cationController with the appropriate label selector, and we would
then be able to control the number of those pods in the cluster by
adjusting the value of the replicas field in the definition. If we set
the replica count equal to 10, then Kubernetes will reconcile its cur‐
rent state to reflect 10 pods running for a given ReplicationCon
troller. If there are only five running at the moment, Kubernetes
will spin up five more. If there are 20 running, Kubernetes will kill
10 (which 10 it kills is nondeterministic, as far as your app is con‐
cerned). Kubernetes will do whatever it needs to converge with the
desired state of 10 replicas. You can imagine controlling the size of a
cluster very easily with a ReplicationController.
Later, the Kubernetes project introduced another concept called a
Deployment that watches the configuration of the replicas (like envi‐
ronment variables, CPU and memory limits, labels, arguments, etc.).
If you update any of these configurations, Kubernetes will perform a
rolling update to replace the previously declared number of replicas
with new ones with the new configuration provided.
We will see examples of Deployments in action in the next chapter.

Services
The last Kubernetes concept you should understand is the Kuber‐
netes Service. We’ve seen that ReplicationControllers can con‐
trol the number of replicas of a service we have. We also saw that

Kubernetes | 67
pods die (either crash on their own or be killed, maybe as part of a
ReplicationController scale-down event). Therefore, when we try
to communicate with a group of pods, we should not rely directly on
their IP addresses (each pod will have its own IP address), as pods
can come and go. What we need is a way to group pods to discover
where they are and how to communicate with them, and possibly
load balance against them. That’s exactly what the Kubernetes Ser
vice does. It allows us to use a label selector to group our pods and
abstract them with a single virtual (cluster) IP that we can then use
to discover them and interact with them. We’ll show some concrete
examples in the next chapter.
With these simple concepts—pods, labels, ReplicationControl
lers, and Services, we can manage and scale our microservices the
way Google has learned to (or learned not to). It takes many years
and many failures to identify simple solutions to complex problems,
so we highly encourage you to familiarize yourself with these con‐
cepts and experience the power of managing containers with Kuber‐
netes for your microservices.

Getting Started with Kubernetes

Docker and Kubernetes are both Linux-native technologies; there‐
fore, they must run in a Linux host operating system. If you’re work‐
ing on a Windows or Mac developer machine, in order to take
advantage of the great features Docker and Kubernetes bring you’ll
need to use a guest Linux VM on your host operating system. You
could download Docker Machine and Toolbox for your environ‐
ment, but then you’d need to manually install Kubernetes (which
can be a little tricky). You could use the upstream Kubernetes
Vagrant images, but like with any fast-moving, open source project,
those can change swiftly and be unstable at times. Additionally, to
take full advantage of Docker’s portability, it’s best to use at least the
same kernel of Linux between environments, and optimally the
same Linux distribution and version. What other options do we
have?

Minishift
To get started developing microservices with Docker and Kuber‐
netes, we’re going to leverage a free developer tool called Minishift.
Minishift is a small tool that runs on a developer’s machine, that

68 | Chapter 5: Deploying Microservices at Scale with Docker and Kubernetes

contains Docker, Kubernetes, and a web console (actually, it runs
Red Hat OpenShift, which is basically a version of Kubernetes with
some other developer self-service and application lifecycle manage‐
ment features, but for this book we’ll just be using the Kubernetes
APIs).

OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift 3.x is an Apache v2 licensed open source devel‐
oper self-service platform, OpenShift Origin, that has been revam‐
ped to use Docker and Kubernetes. OpenShift at one point had its
own cluster management and orchestration engine, but with the
knowledge, simplicity, and power that Kubernetes brings to the
world of container cluster management, it would have been silly to
try to compete. The broader community is converging around
Kubernetes, and Red Hat is all in with Kubernetes.
OpenShift has many features, but one of the most important is that
it’s still native Kubernetes under the covers and supports role-based
access control, out-of-the-box software defined networking, secu‐
rity, logins, developer builds, and many other things. We mention it
here because the flavor of Kubernetes that we’ll use for the rest of
this book is based on OpenShift. We’ll also use the oc OpenShift
command-line tools, which give us a better user experience and
allow us to easily log in to our Kubernetes clusters and control
which project we’re deploying into. Minishift has both vanilla
Kubernetes and OpenShift. For the rest of this book, we’ll be refer‐
ring to OpenShift and Kubernetes interchangeably but using Open‐
Shift.

Getting Started with Minishift

With Minishift, you can build, deploy, and run your microservices
as Docker containers right on your laptop and then opt to deliver
them in a pipeline through other application lifecycle management
features inside of OpenShift or with your own tooling.
To continue with the examples and idioms in the rest of this report,
please install Minishift now, following the instructions. There are
multiple flavors of virtualization (e.g., xhyve, Hyper-V, Linux KVM/
libvirtd, and VirtualBox) that you can use with Minishift. The instal‐
lation instructions contain all of the details you need to get up and
running.

Getting Started with Kubernetes | 69

To start Minishift, type the following:
$ minishift start
This should take you through the provisioning process and boot the
VM. The VM will expose a Docker daemon, the Kubernetes API,
and the oc command-line tools. The oc command-line tools will
allow you to log in to OpenShift/Kubernetes and manage your
projects/namespaces. You could use the kubectl commands your‐
self, but logging in is easier with the oc login command, so for
these examples, we’ll use oc. To have oc available in your path, type:
$ eval $(minishift oc-env)
You might also need to configure OpenShift to enable some Docker
images to be executed by any user. This is done by running the fol‐
lowing command:
$ minishift addon apply anyuid
-- Applying addon 'anyuid':.
When Minishift starts, you will be logged in as a user called devel‐
oper. To log in as admin, type:
$ minishift addon apply admin-user
-- Applying addon 'admin-user':..

$ oc login -u admin -p admin

Logged into "https://192.168.64.30:8443" as "admin"
using existing credentials.

You don't have any projects. You can try to create

a new project, by running

oc new-project <projectname>
Next, let’s create a new project/namespace into which we’ll deploy
our microservices:
$ oc new-project tutorial
Now using project "tutorial" on server
"https://192.168.64.30:8443".
Although not required to run these examples, installing the Docker
CLI for your native developer laptop, is useful as well. This will
allow you to list Docker images and Docker containers right from
your developer laptop as opposed to having to log in to the
Minishift VM. Once you have the Docker CLI installed, you should
be able to run Docker directly from your command-line shell:

70 | Chapter 5: Deploying Microservices at Scale with Docker and Kubernetes

 $ eval $(minishift docker-env)
$ docker ps
$ docker images

Where to Look Next

In this chapter, you learned a little about the pains of deploying and
managing microservices at scale and how Linux containers can help.
We can leverage immutable delivery to reduce configuration drift,
enable repeatable deployments, and help us scale our applications
regardless of whether they’re running. We can use Linux containers
to enable service isolation, rapid delivery, and portability. We can
leverage a scalable container management system like Kubernetes
and take advantage of a lot of its built-in distributed system features,
such as service discovery, failover, health checking, and more. We
don’t need complicated port swizzling or complex service discovery
systems when deploying on Kubernetes because these are problems
that have been solved within the infrastructure itself. To learn more,
please review the following resources:

• “Why Kubernetes Is the New Application Server” by Rafael

Benevides
• “The Decline of Java Application Servers when Using Docker
Containers” by James Strachan
• “An Introduction to Immutable Infrastructure” by Josha Stella
• Docker Documentation
• OpenShift 3.11 Documentation
• Kubernetes
• Kubernetes Documentation: Pods
• Kubernetes Documentation: Labels and Selectors
• Kubernetes Documentation: Deployments
• Kubernetes Documentation: Services

Where to Look Next | 71

 CHAPTER 6
Hands-on Cluster Management,
Failover, and Load Balancing

In Chapter 5, we had a quick introduction to Linux containers, and

cluster management. Let’s jump into using these things to solve
issues with running microservices at scale. For reference, we’ll be
using the microservice projects we developed in Chapters 2, 3, and 4
(Spring Boot, MicroProfile, and Apache Camel, respectively). The
following steps can be accomplished with any of those three Java
frameworks.

Getting Started
To deploy our microservices, we will assume that a Docker image
exists. Each microservice described here already has a Docker image
available at the Docker Hub registry, ready to be consumed. How‐
ever, if you want to craft your own Docker image, this chapter will
cover the steps to make it available inside your Kubernetes/Open‐
Shift cluster.
Each microservice uses the same base Docker image provided by the
Fabric8 team. The image fabric8/java-alpine-openjdk8-jdk uses
OpenJDK 8.0 installed on Alpine Linux distribution, which makes
the image as small as 74 MB.
This image also provides nice features like adjusting the JVM argu‐
ments -Xmx and -Xms, and makes it really simple to run fat JARs.

73
An example Dockerfile to build a Java fat jar image would be as sim‐
ple as:
FROM fabric8/java-alpine-openjdk8-jdk
ENV JAVA_APP_JAR <your-fat-jar-name>
ENV AB_OFF true
ADD target/<your-fat-jar-name> /deployments/

The environment variable JAVA_APP_JAR specifies the name of the

JAR file that should be called by the java -jar command. The envi‐
ronment variable AB_OFF disables the agent bond that enables jolo‐
kia and JMX exporter.

Packaging Our Microservices as Docker Images

Navigate to the hello-springboot directory, and create a Dockerfile
there with the following contents:
FROM fabric8/java-alpine-openjdk8-jdk
ENV JAVA_APP_JAR hello-springboot-1.0.jar
ENV AB_OFF true
ADD target/hello-springboot-1.0.jar /deployments/
You can then run the following command to build the Docker
image:
$ docker build -t rhdevelopers/hello-springboot:1.0 .
Sending build context to Docker daemon 111.3MB
Step 1/4 : FROM fabric8/java-alpine-openjdk8-jdk
---> 4353c2196b11
Step 2/4 : ENV JAVA_APP_JAR demo-thorntail.jar
---> Running in 777ae0de6868
---> 220aece2f437
Removing intermediate container 777ae0de6868
Step 3/4 : ENV AB_OFF true
---> Running in 02b3780c59a3
---> fc1bc50fc932
Removing intermediate container 02b3780c59a3
Step 4/4 : ADD target/demo-thorntail.jar /deployments/
---> 3a4e91b41727
Removing intermediate container b291546e0725
Successfully built 3a4e91b41727

The switch -t specifies the tag name, in the following format:

<organization-name>/<image-name>:<version>.
If you want to try your newly built image, you can create a container
using the command:

74 | Chapter 6: Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing

 $ docker run -it --rm \
-p 8080:8080 rhdevelopers/hello-springboot:1.0

The -it switch instructs Docker to create an interactive process and

assign a terminal to it. The --rm switch instructs docker to delete
this container when we stop it. The -p 8080:8080 instructs Docker
to assign port 8080 from the container to port 8080 in the Docker
daemon host.
Once your container starts, you can open a new terminal and access
it using the curl command:
$ curl $(minishift ip):8080/api/hello
Guten Tag aus 172.17.0.6
These are the basics steps to deploy your application in a Docker
container and try it. However, we will not focus on pure Docker
containers. Instead, in the next chapter, we will see how to use
Kubernetes to run these microservices at scale. Before moving on,
don’t forget to stop the running hello-springboot Docker container
by pressing Ctrl-C.

Deploying to Kubernetes
There are several ways that we could deploy our microservices/
containers inside a Kubernetes/OpenShift cluster. However, for
didatic purposes, we will use YAML files that express very well what
behavior we expect from the cluster.
In the source code for this report, for each microservice example
there is a folder called kubernetes containing two files: deploy‐
ment.yml and service.yml. The deployment file will create a Deploy
ment object with one replica.
The Deployment also provides at least two environment variables.
The one called JAVA_OPTIONS specifies the JVM arguments, like
-Xms and -Xmx. The one called GREETING_BACKENDSERVICEHOST
replaces the values we defined in our first two microservices to find
the BACKEND service, as you’ll see in “Service discovery” on page
80.
Here is the deployment.yml file used for the hello-springboot micro‐
service.
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:

Getting Started | 75
 name: hello-springboot
labels:
app: hello-springboot
book: microservices4javadev
version: v1
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app: hello-springboot
version: v1
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: hello-springboot
book: microservices4javadev
version: v1
spec:
containers:
- env:
- name: JAVA_OPTIONS
value: -Xmx256m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
- name: GREETING_BACKENDSERVICEHOST
value: backend
image: rhdevelopers/hello-springboot:1.0
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
livenessProbe:
httpGet: # make an HTTP request
port: 8080 # port to use
path: /actuator/health # endpoint to hit
scheme: HTTP # or HTTPS
initialDelaySeconds: 20
periodSeconds: 5
timeoutSeconds: 1
name: hello-springboot
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
name: http
protocol: TCP
readinessProbe:
httpGet: # make an HTTP request
port: 8080 # port to use
path: /actuator/health # endpoint to hit
scheme: HTTP # or HTTPS
initialDelaySeconds: 10
periodSeconds: 5
timeoutSeconds: 1
Since the deployment.yml and service.yml files are stored together
with the source code for this report, you can deploy the microservi‐

76 | Chapter 6: Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing

ces by pointing directly to those files using the following commands.
First, deploy the backend microservice:
$ oc create -f http://raw.githubuserconoc create -f http://
raw.githubusercontent.com/redhat-developer/
microservices-book/master/backend/kubernetes/deployment.yml

$ oc create -f http://raw.githubuserconoc create -f http://

raw.githubusercontent.com/redhat-developer/
microservices-book/master/backend/kubernetes/service.yml
Then deploy the hello-springboot microservice:
$ oc create -f http://raw.githubusercontent.com/
redhat-developer/microservices-book/master/
hello-springboot/kubernetes/deployment.yml

$ oc create -f http://raw.githubusercontent.com/
redhat-developer/microservices-book/
master/hello-springboot/kubernetes/service.yml
and the hello-microprofile microservice:
$ oc create -f http://raw.githubusercontent.com/
redhat-developer/microservices-book/
master/hello-microprofile/kubernetes/deployment.yml

$ oc create -f http://raw.githubusercontent.com/
redhat-developer/microservices-book/
master/hello-microprofile/kubernetes/service.yml
Finally, deploy the api-gateway microservice:
$ oc create -f http://raw.githubusercontent.com/
redhat-developer/
microservices-book/master/api-gateway/kubernetes/deployment.yml

$ oc create -f http://raw.githubusercontent.com/
redhat-developer/
microservices-book/master/api-gateway/kubernetes/service.yml
The deployment files will create four pods (one replica for each
microservice). The service files will make each of these replicas visi‐
ble to each other. You can check the pods that have been created
through the command:
$ oc get pods
NAME READY STATUS
api-gateway-5985d46fd5-4nsfs 1/1 Running
backend-659d8c4cb9-5hv2r 1/1 Running
hello-microprofile-844c6c758-mmx4h 1/1 Running
hello-springboot-5bf5c4c7fd-k5mf4 1/1 Running

Getting Started | 77
What advantages does Kubernetes bring as a cluster manager? Let’s
start by exploring the first of many. Let’s kill a pod and see what hap‐
pens:
$ oc delete pod hello-springboot-5bf5c4c7fd-k5mf4
pod "hello-springboot-5bf5c4c7fd-k5mf4" deleted
Now let’s list our pods again:
$ oc get pods
NAME READY STATUS
api-gateway-5985d46fd5-4nsfs 1/1 Running
backend-659d8c4cb9-5hv2r 1/1 Running
hello-microprofile-844c6c758-mmx4h 1/1 Running
hello-springboot-5bf5c4c7fd-28mpk 1/1 Running
Wow! There are still four pods! Another pod was created after we
deleted the previous one. Kubernetes can start/stop/auto-restart
your microservices for you. Can you imagine what a headache it
would be to manually determine whether your services are started/
stopped at any kind of scale? Let’s continue exploring some of the
other valuable cluster management features Kubernetes brings to
the table for managing microservices.

External access
Now that all our microservices have been deployed inside the clus‐
ter, we need to provide external access. Since we have an API Gate‐
way defined, only this microservice needs to be exposed; it will be
the single point of access to invoke the hello-microprofile and hello-
springboot microservices. For a refresher on our microservices
architetcure, take a look at Figure 6-1.

Figure 6-1. Calling another service

78 | Chapter 6: Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing

To enable external access using OpenShift, we need to run the oc
expose service command, followed by the name of the service that
we want to expose (in this case, api-gateway):
$ oc expose service api-gateway
route.route.openshift.io/api-gateway exposed

Now you can try the curl command to test all microservices.
$ curl http://api-gateway-tutorial.$(minishift ip).nip.io
/api/gateway
["Hello from cluster Backend at host: 172.17.0.7",
"Hello Spring Boot from cluster Backend at host: 172.17.0.7"]
The output should show that you reached both microservices
through the API gateway and both of them accessed the backend
microservice, which means that everything is working as expected.

Scaling
One of the advantages of deploying in a microservices architecture
is independent scalability. We should be able to replicate the number
of services in our cluster easily without having to worry about port
conflicts, JVM or dependency mismatches, or what else is running
on the same machine. With Kubernetes, these types of scaling con‐
cerns can be accomplished with the Deployment/ReplicationCon
troller. Let’s see what deployments exist in our deployment:
$ oc get deployments
NAME DESIRED CURRENT UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE
api-gateway 1 1 1 1
backend 1 1 1 1
hello-microprofile 1 1 1 1
hello-springboot 1 1 1 1

All the deployment.yml files that we used have a replicas value of 1.

This means we want to have one pod/instance of our microservice
running at all times. If a pod dies (or gets deleted), then Kubernetes
is charged with reconciling the desired state for us, which is repli
cas=1. If the cluster is not in the desired state, Kubernetes will take
action to make sure the desired configuration is satisfied. What hap‐
pens if we want to change the desired number of replicas and scale
up our service?
$ oc scale deployment hello-springboot --replicas=3
deployment.extensions/hello-springboot scaled

Getting Started | 79
Now if we list the pods, we should see three pods running our hello-
springboot application:
$ oc get pods
NAME READY STATUS
api-gateway-76649cffc-dgr84 1/1 Running
backend-659d8c4cb9-5hv2r 1/1 Running
hello-microprofile-844c6c758-mmx4h 1/1 Running
hello-springboot-5bf5c4c7fd-j77lj 1/1 Running
hello-springboot-5bf5c4c7fd-ltv5p 1/1 Running
hello-springboot-5bf5c4c7fd-w4z7c 1/1 Running
If any of those pods dies or gets deleted, Kubernetes will do what it
needs to do to make sure the replica count for this service is 3.
Notice also that we didn’t have to change ports on these services or
do any unnatural port remapping. Each of the services is listening
on port 8080 and does not collide with the others.
Kubernetes also has the ability to do autoscaling by watching met‐
rics like CPU, memory usage, or user-defined triggers and scaling
the number of replicas up or down to suit. Autoscaling is outside the
scope of this report but is a very valuable piece of the cluster man‐
agement puzzle.

Service discovery
In Kubernetes, a Service is a simple abstraction that provides a level
of indirection between a group of pods and an application using the
service represented by that group of pods. We’ve seen how pods are
managed by Kubernetes and can come and go. We’ve also seen how
Kubernetes can easily scale up the number of instances of a particu‐
lar service. In our example, we deployed our backend service from
the previous chapters to play the role of service provider. How does
our hello-springboot service communicate with that service?
Let’s take a look at what Kubernetes services exist:
$ oc get services
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP PORT(S)
api-gateway ClusterIP 172.30.227.148 8080/TCP
backend ClusterIP 172.30.169.193 8080/TCP
hello-microprofile ClusterIP 172.30.31.211 8080/TCP
hello-springboot ClusterIP 172.30.200.142 8080/TCP

The CLUSTER-IP is assigned when a Service object is created and

never goes away. It’s a single, fixed IP address that is available to any
applications running within the Kubernetes cluster and can be used

80 | Chapter 6: Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing

to talk to backend pods. Take a look at the service.yml file for back‐
end:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: backend
labels:
app: backend
book: microservices4javadev
spec:
ports:
- name: http
port: 8080
selector:
app: backend

The pods are “selected” with the selector field. As we saw in

“Labels” on page 66, pods in Kubernetes can be “labeled” with what‐
ever metadata we want to apply (like “version” or “component” or
“team”), and those labels can subsequently be used in the selector for
a Service. In this example, we’re selecting all the pods with the label
app=backend. This means any pods that have that label can be
reached just by using the cluster IP. There’s no need for complicated
distributed registries (e.g., ZooKeeper, Consul, or Eureka) or any‐
thing like that; it’s all built right into Kubernetes. Cluster-level DNS
is also built into Kubernetes. Using DNS in general for microservice
discovery can be very challenging, if not downright painful. In
Kubernetes, the cluster DNS points to the cluster IP, and since the
cluster IP is a fixed IP and doesn’t go away, there are no issues with
DNS caching and other gremlins that can pop up with traditional
DNS.
When we deployed our hello-microprofile and hello-springboot
microservices, the deployment.yml files each declared an environ‐
ment variable called GREETING_BACKENDSERVICEHOST with the value
backend. That value matches the name of the backend service that
we saw in the output of the command oc get services. This name
was declared in the backend service’s service.yml file.
This environment value replaces the value that we declared in their
application.properites file for our hello-springboot microservice
(greeting.backendServiceHost=localhost; see “Calling Another
Service” on page 46). In our hello-microprofile microservice, the
value was declared using the annotation @ConfigProperty(name =

Getting Started | 81
"greeting.backendServiceHost", defaultValue = "local
host") (see Example 3-5).
Because we declared the name of the service and not the IP address,
all it takes to find it is a little bit of DNS and the power of Kuber‐
netes service discovery. One big thing to notice about this approach
is that we did not specify any extra client libraries or set up any reg‐
istries or anything. We happen to be using Java in this case, but
using Kubernetes cluster DNS provides a technology-agnostic way
of doing basic service discovery!

Fault Tolerance
Complex distributed systems like microservices architectures must
be built with an important premise in mind: things will fail. We can
spend a lot of energy trying to prevent failures, but even then we
won’t be able to predict every case of where and how dependencies
in a microservices environment can fail. A corollary to our premise
that things will fail is therefore we must design our services for failure.
Another way of saying that is that we need to figure out how to sur‐
vive in an environment where there are failures.

Cluster Self-Healing
If a service begins to misbehave, how will we know about it? Ideally,
you might think, our cluster management solution could detect and
alert us about failures and let human intervention take over. This is
the approach we typically take in traditional environments. But
when running microservices at scale, where we have lots of services
that are supposed to be identical, do we really want to have to stop
and troubleshoot every possible thing that can go wrong with a ser‐
vice? Long-running services may experience unhealthy states. An
easier approach is to design our microservices such that they can be
terminated at any moment, especially when they appear to be behav‐
ing incorrectly.
Kubernetes has a couple of health probes we can use out of the box
to allow the cluster to administer and self-heal itself. The first is a
readiness probe, which allows Kubernetes to determine whether or
not a pod should be considered in any service discovery or load-
balancing algorithms. For example, some Java apps may take a few
seconds to bootstrap the containerized process, even though the pod
is technically up and running. If we start sending traffic to a pod in

82 | Chapter 6: Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing

this state, users may experience failures or inconsistent states. With
readiness probes, we can let Kubernetes query an HTTP endpoint
(for example) and only consider the pod ready if it gets an HTTP
200 or some other response. If Kubernetes determines a pod does
not become ready within a specified period of time, the pod will be
killed and restarted.
Another health probe we can use is a liveness probe. This is similar
to the readiness probe; however, it’s applicable after a pod has been
determined to be “ready” and is eligible to receive traffic. Over the
course of the life of a pod or service, if the liveness probe (which
could also be a simple HTTP endpoint) starts to indicate an unheal‐
thy state (e.g., HTTP 500 errors), Kubernetes can automatically kill
the pod and restart it.
In the deployment.yml file shown earlier we declared both of these,
with livenessProbe and readinessProbe:
livenessProbe:
httpGet: # make an HTTP request
port: 8080 # port to use
path: /actuator/health # endpoint to hit
scheme: HTTP # or HTTPS
...
readinessProbe:
httpGet: # make an HTTP request
port: 8080 # port to use
path: /actuator/health # endpoint to hit
scheme: HTTP # or HTTPS
This means the “readiness” of a hello-springboot pod will be deter‐
mined by periodically polling the /actuator/health endpoint of the
pod (the endpoint was added when we added the actuator to our
Spring Boot microservice earlier). If the pod is ready, it returns:
{"status":"UP"}
The same thing can be done with MicroPorfile/Thorntail and
Apache Camel.

Circuit Breaker
As a service provider, your responsibility is to your consumers to
provide the functionality you’ve promised. Following promise
theory, a service provider may depend on other services or down‐
stream systems but cannot and should not impose requirements
upon them. A service provider is wholly responsible for its promise

Fault Tolerance | 83
to consumers. Because distributed systems can and do fail, however,
there will be times when service promises can’t be met or can be
only partly met. In our previous examples, we showed our “hello”
microservices reaching out to a backend service to form a greeting at
the /api/greeting endpoint. What happens if the backend service is
not available? How do we hold up our end of the promise?
We need to be able to deal with these kinds of distributed systems
faults. A service may not be available; a network may be experienc‐
ing intermittent connectivity; the backend service may be experienc‐
ing enough load to slow it down and introduce latency; a bug in the
backend service may be causing application-level exceptions. If we
don’t deal with these situations explicitly; we run the risk of degrad‐
ing our own service; holding up threads, database locks, and resour‐
ces, and contributing to rolling, cascading failures that can take an
entire distributed network down. The following subsections present
two different approaches to help us account for these failures (one
for each technology, Spring Boot and MicroProfile).

Circuit breaker with MicroProfile

Let’s start with MicroProfile, by adding a microprofile-fault-
tolerance dependency to our Maven pom.xml:
<dependency>
<groupId>io.thorntail</groupId>
<artifactId>microprofile-fault-tolerance</artifactId>
</dependency>

Now we can annotate our greeting() method with the annotations

@CircuitBreaker and @Timeout. But if a backend dependency
becomes latent or unavailable and MicroProfile intervenes with a
circuit breaker, how does our service keep its promise? The answer
to this may be very domain-specific. Consider our earlier example of
a personalized book recommendation service. If this service isn’t
available or is too slow to respond, the backend could default to
sending a book list that’s not personalized. Maybe we’d send back a
book list that’s generic for users in a particular region, or just a
generic “list of the day.” To do this, we can use MicroProfile built-in
fallback() method. In Example 6-1, we add a fallback() method
to return a generic response if the backend service is not available.
We also add the @Fallback annotation to our GreeterRestControl
ler class specifying the method to call if the greeting invocation

84 | Chapter 6: Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing

fails, along with the @Timeout annotation to avoid the microservice
waiting more than one second for a reply.

Example 6-1. src/main/java/com/example/hellomicroprofile/rest/

GreeterRestController.java

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api")
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="greeting")
public class GreeterRestController {

// Not showing variables

@GET
@Produces("text/plain")
@Path("greeting")
@CircuitBreaker
@Timeout
@Fallback(fallbackMethod = "fallback")
public String greeting(){
// greeting implementation
}

public String fallback(){

return saying + " at host " +
System.getenv("HOSTNAME") + " - (fallback)";
}

Circuit breaker with Spring Boot

For Spring Boot, we will use a library from the NetflixOSS stack
named Hystrix. This library is integrated with Spring through a
Spring library called Spring Cloud.
Hystrix is a fault-tolerant Java library that allows microservices to
hold up their end of a promise by:

• Providing protection against dependencies that are unavailable

• Monitoring and providing timeouts to guard against unexpec‐
ted dependency latency
• Load shedding and self-healing
• Degrading gracefully
• Monitoring failure states in real time

Fault Tolerance | 85
 • Injecting business logic and other stateful handling of faults

First, let’s add the spring-cloud-starter-netflix-hystrix

dependency to our Maven pom.xml:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-hystrix</artifactId>
<version>2.0.2.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

In Example 6-2, we add the annotation @HystricCommand and the

fallback() method to to the GreeterRestController class.

Example 6-2. src/main/java/com/example/GreeterRestController.java

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api")
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="greeting")
public class GreeterRestController {

// Not showing variables and setters

@RequestMapping(value = "/greeting",
method = RequestMethod.GET, produces = "text/plain")
@HystrixCommand(fallbackMethod = "fallback")
public String greeting(){

String backendServiceUrl = String.format(

"http://%s:%d/api/backend?greeting={greeting}",
backendServiceHost, backendServicePort);

System.out.println("Sending to: " + backendServiceUrl);

BackendDTO response = template.getForObject(

backendServiceUrl, BackendDTO.class, saying);

return response.getGreeting() + " at host: " +

response.getIp();
}

public String fallback(){

return saying + " at host " +
System.getenv("HOSTNAME") + " - (fallback)";
}

86 | Chapter 6: Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing

We also need to add one last annotation, @EnableCircuitBreaker as
shown in Example 6-3; that’s necessary to tell Spring Cloud that the
hello-springboot application uses circuit breakers and to enable their
monitoring, opening, and closing (behavior supplied, in our case, by
Hystrix).

Example 6-3. src/main/java/com/redhat/examples/hellospringboot/

HelloSpringbootApplication

@EnableCircuitBreaker
@SpringBootApplication
public class HelloSpringbootApplication {

public static void main(String[] args) {

SpringApplication
.run(HelloSpringbootApplication.class, args);
}

Testing the circuit breaker

We know that both microservices (hello-microprofile and hello-
springboot) depend on backend. What should be the expected behav‐
ior if we stop the backend application after we’ve made the latest
modifications?
To test this behavior, we need to recreate the Docker image and
restart the containers so the new image will be loaded.
If you want to build your own source code, navigate to the directory
where your microservices are, create the Dockerfile as instructed in
“Packaging Our Microservices as Docker Images” on page 74, and
run the following commands to rebuild the Docker images:
$ cd <PROJECT_ROOT>/hello-springboot
$ mvn clean package
$ docker build -t rhdevelopers/hello-springboot:1.0 .

$ cd <PROJECT_ROOT>/hello-microprofile
$ mvn clean package
$ docker build -t rhdevelopers/hello-microprofile:1.0 .
Now that the images have been rebuilt, we can delete the previous
running containers—Kubernetes will restart them using the new
Docker images:

Fault Tolerance | 87
 $ oc delete pod -l app=hello-springboot
$ oc delete pod -l app=hello-microprofile
We also need to scale the backend service to 0 replicas:
$ oc scale deployment backend --replicas=0

Now, we wait for all pods but the backend to be Running and try the
api-gateway service to get the response from both microservices:
$ curl http://api-gateway-tutorial.$(minishift ip).nip.io
/api/gateway
["Hello at host hello-
microprofile-57c9f8f9f4-24c2l- (fallback)",
"Hello Spring Boot at host hello-
springboot-f797878bd-24hxm- (fallback)"]

The response now shows that the fallback() methods in both

microservicies were invoked because no communication with the
backend service was possible.
The idea behind this contrived example is ubiquitous. However, the
decision of whether to fall back, gracefully degrade, or break a
promise is very domain-specific. For example, if you’re trying to
transfer money in a banking application and a backend service is
down, you may wish to reject the transfer, or you may wish to make
only a certain part of the transfer available while the backend gets
reconciled. Either way, there is no one-size-fits-all fallback method.
In general, the ideal fallback solution is dependent on what kind of
customer experience gets exposed and how best to gracefully
degrade considering the domain.

Load Balancing
In a highly scaled distributed system, we need a way to discover and
load balance against services in the cluster. As we’ve seen in previous
examples, our microservices must be able to handle failures; there‐
fore, we have to be able to load balance against services that exist,
services that may be joining or leaving the cluster, or services that
exist in an autoscaling group. Rudimentary approaches to load bal‐
ancing, like round-robin DNS, are not adequate. We may also need
sticky sessions, autoscaling, or more complex load-balancing algo‐
rithms. Let’s take a look at a few different ways of doing load balanc‐
ing in a microservices environment.

88 | Chapter 6: Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing

Kubernetes Load Balancing
The great thing about Kubernetes is that it provides a lot of dis‐
tributed systems features out of the box; no need to add any extra
components (server side) or libraries (client side). Kubernetes Ser
vices provided a means to discover microservices, and they also
provide server-side load balancing. If you recall, a Kubernetes Ser
vice is an abstraction over a group of pods that can be specified
with label selectors. For all the pods that can be selected with the
specified selector, Kubernetes will load balance any requests across
them. The default Kubernetes load-balancing algorithm is round
robin, but it can be configured for other algorithms, such as session
affinity. Note that clients don’t have to do anything to add a pod to
the Service; just adding a label to your pod will enable it for selec‐
tion and make it available. Clients reach the Kubernetes Service by
using the cluster IP or cluster DNS service provided out of the box
by Kubernetes. Also recall the cluster DNS service is not like tradi‐
tional DNS and does not fall prey to the DNS caching TTL prob‐
lems typically encountered with using DNS for discovery/load
balancing. Furthermore, there are no hardware load balancers to
configure or maintain; it’s all just built in.
To demonstrate load balancing, let’s scale up the backend services in
our cluster and scale our hello-springboot service back to one replica
to reduce the resource usage:
$ oc scale deployment hello-springboot --replicas=1
deployment.extensions/hello-springboot scaled

$ oc scale deployment backend --replicas=3

deployment.extensions "backend" scaled
Now if we check our pods, we should see three backend pods:
$ oc get pods
NAME READY STATUS
api-gateway-9786d4977-2jnfm 1/1 Running
backend-859bbd5cc-ck68q 1/1 Running
backend-859bbd5cc-j46gj 1/1 Running
backend-859bbd5cc-mdvcs 1/1 Running
hello-microprofile-57c9f8f9f4-24c2l 1/1 Running
hello-springboot-f797878bd-24hxm 1/1 Running
If we describe the Kubernetes services backend, we should see the
the selector used to select the pods that will be eligible for taking

Load Balancing | 89
requests. The Service will load balance to the pods listed in the End
points field:
$ oc describe service backend
Name: backend
Namespace: microservices4java
Labels: app=backend
Annotations: <none>
Selector: app=backend
Type: ClusterIP
IP: 172.30.169.193
Port: http 8080/TCP
TargetPort: 8080/TCP
Endpoints: 172.17.0.11:8080,172.17.0.13:8080,
172.17.0.14:8080
Session Affinity: None
Events: <none>
We can see here that the backend service will select all pods with the
label app=backend. Let’s take a moment to see what labels are on one
of the backend pods:
$ oc describe pod/backend-859bbd5cc-ck68q | grep Labels
Labels: app=backend
The backend pods have a label that matches what the service is look‐
ing for, so any communication with the service will be load-
balanced over these matching pods.
Let’s make a few calls to our api-gateway service. We should see the
responses contain different IP addresses for the backend service:
$ curl http://api-gateway-tutorial.$(minishift ip).nip.io
/api/gateway
["Hello from cluster Backend at host: 172.17.0.11",
"Hello Spring Boot from cluster Backend at host: 172.17.0.14"]

$ curl http://api-gateway-tutorial.$(minishift ip).nip.io

/api/gateway
["Hello from cluster Backend at host: 172.17.0.13",
"Hello Spring Boot from cluster Backend at host: 172.17.0.14"]

We used curl here, but you can use your favorite HTTP/REST tool,
including your web browser. Just refresh your browser a few times;
you should see that the backend that gets called is different each
time, indicating that the Kubernetes Service is load balancing over
the respective pods as expected.
When you’re done experimenting, don’t forget to reduce the number
of replicas in your cluster to reduce the resource consumption:

90 | Chapter 6: Hands-on Cluster Management, Failover, and Load Balancing

 $ oc scale deployment backend --replicas=1
deployment.extensions/backend scaled

Where to Look Next

In this chapter, you learned a little about the pains of deploying and
managing microservices at scale and how Linux containers can help.
We can leverage true immutable delivery to reduce configuration
drift, and we can use Linux containers to enable service isolation,
rapid delivery, and portability. We can leverage scalable container
management systems like Kubernetes features that are built in, such
as service discovery, failover, health-checking, and much more. You
don’t need complicated port swizzling or complex service discovery
systems when deploying on Kubernetes because these are problems
that have been solved within the infrastructure itself. To learn more,
please review the following resources:

• Spring Cloud
• MicroProfile Fault Tolerance
• Hystrix on GitHub
• Kubernetes
• OpenShift 3.11 Documentation
• “Why Kubernetes Is the New Application Server” by Rafael
Benevides

Where to Look Next | 91

 CHAPTER 7
Distributed Tracing with
OpenTracing

In the previous chapters, we built a couple of microservices that

connect to a backend. To access these two microservices, we also
built an API Gateway. With just a few microservices, it’s easy to
understand the topology and what calls what inside our cluster.
However, in a real-world scenario the network of services will likely
be far more complex, and therefore it will be much more complex to
monitor the number of requests, the response time, and the path of
a particular invocation. A simple invocation can traverse several
microservices, and any particular issue will be hard to detect if we
don’t have the ability to trace those invocations.
One things that we need to keep in mind is that distributed tracing
should be technology-agnostic, because a Java microservice might
invoke a .NET microservice that will call a Python microservice, and
they should all accept and propagate the tracing information.
In 2010, Google published a paper about the project Dapper, which
was designed to provide a solution for distributed tracing. This
paper influenced several open source implementations, like Zipkin
and Appdash. In 2015 the OpenTracing project was started, and in
2016 it became a hosted project of the Cloud Native Computing
Foundation (CNCF).
OpenTracing is comprised of a set of standard APIs and a vendor-
neutral framework for instrumentation. It supports the following
platforms: Go, JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Objective-C,

93
C++, and C#. There are already several OpenTracing implementa‐
tions, including Jaeger (from Uber), Apache Skywalking, and
Instana, and others. In this report, we will use Jaeger, which is the
most widely used implementation of OpenTracing.

Installing Jaeger
All information captured on each microservice should be reported
to a server that will collect and store this information, so it can be
queried later.
So, before instrumenting the source code of our microservices, first
we need to install the Jaeger server and its components. Jaeger pro‐
vides an all-in-one distribution composed of the Jaeger UI, collector,
query, and agent, with an in-memory storage component.
We can install this distribution with the following command:
$ oc process -f \
http://raw.githubusercontent.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-openshift
/master/
all-in-one/jaeger-all-in-one-template.yml | oc create -f -

deployment.extensions "jaeger" created

service "jaeger-query" created
service "jaeger-collector" created
service "jaeger-agent" created
service "zipkin" created
route.route.openshift.io "jaeger-query" created
That’s it! Now we can start modifying our microservices to report
the tracing information to this server.

Modifying Microservices for Distributed

Tracing
Now that we have our Jaeger server installed, it’s time to modify our
microservices to report information to it.
All Java OpenTracing libraries can be configured using environment
variables. The only environment variable that is required is
JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME, which tells Jaeger the name of the service.
This will be declared as an ENV instruction in each microservice’s
Dockerfile. Because we will also need other environment variables
on all microservices to configure the tracing collector, they will be

94 | Chapter 7: Distributed Tracing with OpenTracing

declared using a Kubernetes feature called a ConfigMap, and then
will be consumed by all the microservices.

Modifying the API gateway

The first microservice that we will modify is the api-gateway service.
Since it was built using Camel, we will make use of a Camel compo‐
nent called camel-opentracing. This component is used for tracing
incoming and outcoming Camel messages.
To use this Camel component, we just need to add the dependency
camel-opentracing-starter that enables the integration of Camel,
Spring Boot, and OpenTracing to our pom.xml file. We will also
need to add two Jaeger libraries--jaeger-tracerresolver gets the
Tracer object and configures it from environment variables, and
jaeger-thrift is a set of components that send data to the backend:
<!-- OpenTracing -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
<artifactId>camel-opentracing-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.jaegertracing</groupId>
<artifactId>jaeger-tracerresolver</artifactId>
<version>0.32.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.jaegertracing</groupId>
<artifactId>jaeger-thrift</artifactId>
<version>0.32.0</version>
</dependency>
Now we can “turn on” the OpenTracing feature by annotating the
main class with @CamelOpenTracing as shown in Example 7-1.

Example 7-1. src/main/java/com/redhat/examples/

MySpringBootApplication.java

@SpringBootApplication
@CamelOpenTracing
public class MySpringBootApplication {

/**
* A main method to start this application.
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(MySpringBootApplication.class, args);

Modifying Microservices for Distributed Tracing | 95

 }

As mentioned previously, the Tracer object will be configured using

several environment variables. Because the only one that is required
is JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME, we will add this to our Dockerfile with the
value API-Gateway:
FROM fabric8/java-alpine-openjdk8-jdk
ENV JAVA_APP_JAR api-gateway-1.0.jar
ENV AB_OFF true
ENV JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME API-Gateway
ADD target/api-gateway-1.0.jar /deployments/
Now we can rebuild the JAR file and the Docker image and restart
the Kubernetes pod with the following commands:
$ mvn clean package
$ docker build -t rhdevelopers/api-gateway:1.0 .
$ oc delete pod -l app=api-gateway

Modifying the Spring Boot microservice

For our hello_springboot microservice, we need to add the same
jaeger-tracerresolver and jaeger-thrift libraries that we
included in the api-gateway service, plus the opentracing-spring-
web-starter dependency that will be responsible for providing the
integration with Spring Boot and OpenTracing:
<!-- OpenTracing -->
<dependency>
<groupId>io.opentracing.contrib</groupId>
<artifactId>opentracing-spring-web-starter</artifactId>
<version>1.0.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.jaegertracing</groupId>
<artifactId>jaeger-tracerresolver</artifactId>
<version>0.32.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.jaegertracing</groupId>
<artifactId>jaeger-thrift</artifactId>
<version>0.32.0</version>
</dependency>

96 | Chapter 7: Distributed Tracing with OpenTracing

To enable the tracing headers to be forwarded from this microser‐
vice to the backend, the RestTemplate needs an interceptor called
TracingRestTemplateInterceptor.
Let’s modify the GreeterRestController class to add this intercep‐
tor, as shown in Example 7-2.

Example 7-2. src/main/java/com/redhat/examples/hellospringboot/

GreeterRestController.java

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api")
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="greeting")
public class GreeterRestController {

private RestTemplate template = new RestTemplate();

private String saying, backendServiceHost;

private int backendServicePort;

@RequestMapping(value = "/greeting",
method = RequestMethod.GET, produces = "text/plain")
@HystrixCommand(fallbackMethod = "fallback")
public String greeting(){
template.setInterceptors(
Collections.singletonList(
new TracingRestTemplateInterceptor(
TracerResolver.resolveTracer())));

String backendServiceUrl = String.format(

"http://%s:%d/api/backend?greeting={greeting}",
backendServiceHost, backendServicePort);

System.out.println("Sending to: " + backendServiceUrl);

BackendDTO response = template.getForObject(

backendServiceUrl, BackendDTO.class, saying);

return response.getGreeting() + " at host: " +

response.getIp();
}

//fallback method and setters

}

Now let’s add the declaration of the JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME environ‐

ment variable in the Dockerfile:

Modifying Microservices for Distributed Tracing | 97

 FROM fabric8/java-alpine-openjdk8-jdk
ENV JAVA_APP_JAR hello-springboot-1.0.jar
ENV AB_OFF true
ENV JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME hello-springboot
ADD target/hello-springboot-1.0.jar /deployments/
Then we can rebuild the JAR file and the Docker image and restart
the Kubernetes pod with the following commands:
$ mvn clean package -DskipTests
$ docker build -t rhdevelopers/hello-springboot:1.0 .
$ oc delete pod -l app=hello-springboot

Modifying the MicroProfile microservice

For our hello_microprofile, we will follow the same recipe:

1. Add a Maven dependency.

2. Modify the source code.
3. Add the JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME environment variable to the
Dockerfile.

Let’s start by adding the Maven dependencies related to OpenTrac‐

ing and Jaeger, respectively. MicroProfile has support for OpenTrac‐
ing and Thorntail has integration with Jaeger, so we will need both
dependencies:
<!-- OpenTracing -->
<dependency>
<groupId>io.thorntail</groupId>
<artifactId>microprofile-opentracing</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.thorntail</groupId>
<artifactId>jaeger</artifactId>
</dependency>
MicroProfile has an API for accessing an OpenTracing-compliant
Tracer object within a JAX-RS application. We just need to add the
@Traced annotation to the methods that will be “traced.” We also
need to use the class ClientTracingRegistrar to configure tracing
features into the JAX-RS client. Let’s perform these modifications to
the greeting() method in the GreeterRestController class in
Example 7-3.

98 | Chapter 7: Distributed Tracing with OpenTracing

Example 7-3. src/main/java/com/redhat/examples/hellomicroprofile/
rest/GreeterRestController.java

@Path("/api")
public class GreeterRestController {

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name="greeting.saying",
defaultValue = "Hello")
private String saying;

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name = "greeting.backendServiceHost",
defaultValue = "localhost")
private String backendServiceHost;

@Inject
@ConfigProperty(name = "greeting.backendServicePort",
defaultValue = "8080")
private int backendServicePort;

@GET
@Produces("text/plain")
@Path("greeting")
@CircuitBreaker
@Timeout
@Fallback(fallbackMethod = "fallback")
@Traced(operationName = "greeting")
public String greeting() {
String backendServiceUrl = String.format("http://%s:%d",
backendServiceHost,backendServicePort);

System.out.println("Sending to: " + backendServiceUrl);

Client client = ClientTracingRegistrar

.configure(ClientBuilder.newBuilder()).build();

BackendDTO backendDTO = client.target(backendServiceUrl)

.path("api")
.path("backend")
.queryParam("greeting", saying)
.request(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE)
.get(BackendDTO.class);

return backendDTO.getGreeting()
+ " at host: " + backendDTO.getIp();
}

public String fallback(){

return saying + " at host " +
System.getenv("HOSTNAME") + " - (fallback)";

Modifying Microservices for Distributed Tracing | 99

 }

That’s it! Just one annotation and we are good to go. But let’s not for‐
get about the JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME in the Dockerfile:
FROM fabric8/java-alpine-openjdk8-jdk
ENV JAVA_APP_JAR demo-thorntail.jar
ENV AB_OFF true
ENV JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME hello-microprofile
ADD target/demo-thorntail.jar /deployments/
We can then rebuild the JAR file and the Docker image and restart
the Kubernetes pod with the following commands:
$ mvn clean package -DskipTests
$ docker build -t rhdevelopers/hello-microprofile:1.0 .
$ oc delete pod -l app=hello-microprofile

Modifying the Servlet backend

Finally, we will add tracing capabilities to our backend application.
To make this happen, we will add the dependency jaeger-client to
our pom.xml file:
<!-- OpenTracing -->
<dependency>
<groupId>io.jaegertracing</groupId>
<artifactId>jaeger-client</artifactId>
<version>0.32.0</version>
</dependency>

With this library, the backend application using OpenTracing’s Trac

erResolver can continue using the Jaeger Java client without any
hardcoded dependency; we can configure it via environment vari‐
ables just like we did for the previous microservice.
On the source code side, it will require a little bit more work as we
need to extract the parent Span coming from the microservice’s
request headers and create a new child Span. This can be done using
the following code snippet:
//Extract the parent Span from the headers
SpanContext parentSpan = tracer
.extract(Format.Builtin.HTTP_HEADERS,
new TextMapExtractAdapter(headers));

//Start a new Span as a child of the Parent Span

Scope scope = tracer

100 | Chapter 7: Distributed Tracing with OpenTracing

 .buildSpan("backend-servlet")
.asChildOf(parentSpan)
.startActive(true);

//Perform work

scope.span().finish();

Example 7-4 shows the necessary modifications in the BackendHtt

pServlet class.

Example 7-4. src/main/java/com/redhat/examples/backend/

BackendHttpServlet.java

@WebServlet(urlPatterns = {"/api/backend"})
public class BackendHttpServlet extends HttpServlet {

private Tracer tracer = TracerResolver.resolveTracer();

@Override
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req,
HttpServletResponse resp)
throws ServletException, IOException {

//Place the HTTP headers in a HashMap

final HashMap<String, String> headers = new HashMap<>();
Enumeration<String> headerNames = req.getHeaderNames();
while (headerNames.hasMoreElements()){
String name = headerNames.nextElement();
String value = req.getHeader(name);
headers.put(name, value);
}
//Extract the parent Span from the headers
SpanContext parentSpan = tracer
.extract(Format.Builtin.HTTP_HEADERS,
new TextMapExtractAdapter(headers));

//Start a new Span as a child of the parent Span

Scope scope = tracer
.buildSpan("backend-servlet")
.asChildOf(parentSpan)
.startActive(true);

resp.setContentType("application/json");

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

String greeting = req.getParameter("greeting");

ResponseDTO response = new ResponseDTO();

response.setGreeting(greeting + " from cluster Backend");

Modifying Microservices for Distributed Tracing | 101

 response.setTime(System.currentTimeMillis());
response.setIp(getIp());

PrintWriter out = resp.getWriter();

mapper.writerWithDefaultPrettyPrinter()
.writeValue(out, response);

scope.span().finish();
}

private String getIp() {

String hostname = null;
try {
hostname = InetAddress.getLocalHost()
.getHostAddress();
} catch (UnknownHostException e) {
hostname = "unknown";
}
return hostname;
}
}

We must also to add the declaration of the JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME

environment variable in the Dockerfile:
FROM jboss/wildfly:10.0.0.Final
ENV JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME backend
ADD target/ROOT.war /opt/jboss/wildfly/standalone/deployments/
Now we can rebuild the JAR file and the Docker image and restart
the Kubernetes pod with the following commands:
$ mvn clean package -DskipTests
$ docker build -t rhdevelopers/backend:1.0 .
$ oc delete pod -l app=backend

Configuring Microservices Using ConfigMap

As we discussed previously, the configuration of Jaeger Java clients is
done through environment variables. In any case, the only environ‐
ment variable that is required is JAEGER_SERVICE_NAME, which we
defined in every Dockerfile.
If you look at the logs of any microservices, you should see a mes‐
sage like the following:
Initialized tracer=JaegerTracer(
version=Java-0.32.0,
serviceName=API-Gateway,
reporter=RemoteReporter(

102 | Chapter 7: Distributed Tracing with OpenTracing

 sender=UdpSender(),
closeEnqueueTimeout=1000), sampler=
RemoteControlledSampler(
maxOperations=2000,
manager=HttpSamplingManager(
hostPort=localhost:5778),
sampler=ProbabilisticSampler(
tags={sampler.type=probabilistic,
sampler.param=0.001})),
...

This means that the default configuration for the tracer uses a UDP
Sender that sends the tracing information to localhost:5778. The
ProbabilisticSampler defines that only 0.1% (0.001) of the
requests will be traced. Tracing only 0.1% of the requests seems fine
for production usage. However, for our tutorial we will change the
tracer to collect all requests.
According to the environment variable definitions in the jaeger-
core module, we will need to configure the following keys/values for
all microservices:

• JAEGER_ENDPOINT: http://jaeger-collector:14268/api/
traces
• JAEGER_REPORTER_LOG_SPANS: true
• JAEGER_SAMPLER_TYPE: const
• JAEGER_SAMPLER_PARAM: 1

These environment variables configure the tracer to send an HTTP

report to http://jaeger-collector:14268/api/traces. Every tracer report
will be logged, and we will use a constant sampler that collects 100%
of the requests (1 of 1).
We could use the command oc set env for every microservice, but
we want to try something more advanced. We will create a Config
map Kubernetes object to hold this configuration. Later we will con‐
sume the configurations using environment variables, but don’t
worry about the details right now.
$ oc set env deployment --all --from=configmap/jaeger-config
deployment.extensions/api-gateway updated
deployment.extensions/backend updated
deployment.extensions/hello-microprofile updated
deployment.extensions/hello-springboot updated
deployment.extensions/jaeger updated

Configuring Microservices Using ConfigMap | 103

Note that it will cause the deployment of every microservice and
that the logs now for any microservice will contain different infor‐
mation about the tracer:
Initialized tracer=JaegerTracer(
version=Java-0.32.0,
serviceName=API-Gateway,
reporter=CompositeReporter(
reporters=[RemoteReporter(
sender=HttpSender(),
closeEnqueueTimeout=1000),
LoggingReporter(
...
sampler=ConstSampler(
decision=true,
tags={sampler.type=const, sampler.param=true}),
tags={hostname=api-gateway-78f6f8dcd7-wckvx,
jaeger.version=Java-0.32.0,
ip=172.17.0.16},
...
Wait for the pods to come alive, and try making a request to the
microservice:
$ curl http://api-gateway-tutorial.$(minishift ip).nip.io
/api/gateway
["Hello from cluster Backend at host: 172.17.0.13",
"Hello Spring Boot from cluster Backend at host: 172.17.0.13"]
You should see something like this in the logs:
i.j.internal.reporters.LoggingReporter
: Span reported: d716584c2fab233d:d716584c2fab233d:0:1

Analyzing the Tracing in Jaeger

Now that we’ve made a request using the curl command, and we’ve
seen in the logs that this request generated a tracer Span that was
reported to Jaeger, we can open the Jaeger UI to look at some impor‐
tant information. To open the UI in your browser, use the following
command:
$ minishift openshift service jaeger-query --in-browser
In the top menu, select Dependencies, and then select DAG. Note
that the generated dependency graph is similar to what we expected
(Figure 7-1 from Jaeger and Figure 7-2 from our architecture show
the same pattern). The number 1 in the Jaeger DAG indicates the
number of requests between the microservices.

104 | Chapter 7: Distributed Tracing with OpenTracing

Figure 7-1. Jaeger dependencies

Figure 7-2. Calling another service

Now click Search in the top menu, and select the API-Gateway ser‐
vice. Scroll down the page, and click the Find Traces button. You
should see the tracing generated by your request with the curl com‐
mand, as shown in Figure 7-3.

Figure 7-3. Jaeger tracing

Click on the trace, and Jaeger will open the details. It’s easy to see
that the api-gateway service made parallel requests to hello-

Analyzing the Tracing in Jaeger | 105

microprofile and hello-springboot. You can click on the details of each
Span to verify the path walked by the request inside the Camel
routes until it reached the microservice. Figure 7-4 shows the Span
details.

Figure 7-4. Span details

Feel free to go ahead and search for the backend service spans.

Where to Look Next

In this chapter, you learned about distributed tracing, the CNCF
OpenTracing specification, and the Jaeger implementation. You also
learned how to instrument different technologies to collect and
report tracing information, and learned how to use ConfigMaps to
store and spread the configuration. Tracing is a complex subject,
and we just covered the basics without going deeper into how the
tracing happens. Check out the following links for more informa‐
tion:

• OpenTracing
• Jaeger
• The camel-opentracing component
• Jaeger bindings for the Java OpenTracing API
• “Using OpenTracing with Jaeger to Collect Application Metrics
in Kubernetes” by Diane Mueller-Klingspor
• “OpenShift Commons Briefing #82: Distributed Tracing with
Jaeger & Prometheus on Kubernetes” by Diane Mueller

106 | Chapter 7: Distributed Tracing with OpenTracing

 CHAPTER 8
Where Do We Go from Here?

We have covered a lot in this report, but we certainly didn’t cover

everything! Keep in mind we are just scratching the surface here,
and there are many more things to consider in a microservices envi‐
ronment than what we could explore in this report. In this final
chapter, we’ll very briefly talk about a couple of additional concepts
you should be aware of. We’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to
dig into more detail for each section!

Configuration
Configuration is a very important part of any distributed system,
and it becomes even more difficult with microservices. We need to
find a good balance between configuration and immutable delivery
because we don’t want to end up with snowflake services. For exam‐
ple, we’ll need to be able to change logging, switch on features for
A/B testing, configure database connections, and use secret keys or
passwords. We saw in some of our examples how to configure our
microservices using each of the three Java frameworks presented
here, but each framework does configuration slightly differently.
What if we have microservices written in Python, Scala, Golang,
Node.js, etc.?
To be able to manage configuration across technologies and within
containers, we need to adopt an approach that works regardless of
what’s actually running in the containers. In a Docker environment,
we can inject environment variables and allow our application to
consume those environment variables. Kubernetes allows us to do

107
that as well, and considers it a good practice. Kubernetes also
includes APIs for mounting Secrets that allow us to safely decouple
usernames, passwords, and private keys from our applications and
inject them into the Linux container when needed. Furthermore, the
recently added ConfigMaps, which are very similar to Secrets in that
they allow application-level configuration to be managed and
decoupled from the application’s Docker image, and also allow us to
inject configuration via environment variables and/or files on the
container’s filesystem. If an application can consume configuration
files from the filesystem (which we saw with all three Java frame‐
works) or read environment variables, it can leverage the Kuber‐
netes configuration functionality. Taking this approach, we don’t
have to set up additional configuration services and complex clients
for consuming it. Configuration for our microservices running
inside containers (or even outside them), regardless of technology, is
now baked into the cluster management infrastructure.

Logging and Metrics

Without a doubt, a lot of the drawbacks to implementing a micro‐
services architecture revolve around management of the services in
terms of logging, metrics, and tracing. The more you break a system
into individual parts, the more tooling, forethought, and insight you
need to see the big picture. When you run services at scale, espe‐
cially assuming a model where things fail, you need a way to grab
information about services and correlate that with other data (like
metrics and tracing), regardless of whether the containers are still
alive. There are a handful of approaches to consider when devising
your logging and metrics strategy:

• Developers exposing their logs

• Aggregation/centralization
• Searching and correlating
• Visualizing and charting

Kubernetes has add-ons to enable cluster-wide logging and metrics

collection for microservices. Typical technologies for solving these
issues include syslog, Fluentd, or Logstash for getting logs out of
services and streaming them to a centralized aggregator. Some folks
use messaging solutions to provide some reliability for these logs if
needed. ElasticSearch is an excellent choice for aggregating logs in a

108 | Chapter 8: Where Do We Go from Here?

central, scalable, searchable index, and if you layer Kibana on top,
you get nice dashboards and search UIs. Other tools, like Prome‐
theus, Jaeger, Grafana, Hawkular, Netflix Servo, and many others,
should be considered as well.

Continuous Delivery
Deploying microservices with immutable images, as discussed ear‐
lier in Chapter 5, is paramount. When we have many more (if
smaller) services than before, our existing manual processes will not
scale. Moreover, with each team owning and operating their own
microservices, we need a way for teams to make immutable delivery
a reality without bottlenecks and human error. Once we release our
microservices, we need to have insight and feedback about their
usage to help drive further change. As the business requests change,
and as we get more feedback loops into the system, we will be doing
more releases more often. To make this a reality, we need a capable
software delivery pipeline. This pipeline may be composed of multi‐
ple subpipelines with gates and promotion steps, but ideally, we
want to automate the build, test, and deploy mechanics as much as
possible.
Tools like Docker and Kubernetes also give us the built-in capacity
to implement rolling upgrades, blue-green deployments, canary
releases, and other deployment strategies. Obviously these tools are
not required to deploy in this manner (places like Amazon and Net‐
flix have done it for years without Linux containers), but the incep‐
tion of containers does give us the isolation and immutability factors
to make this easier. You can use your CI/CD tooling, like Jenkins
and Jenkins Pipeline, in conjunction with Kubernetes and build out
flexible yet powerful build and deployment pipelines. Take a look at
OpenShift for more details on an implementation of CI/CD with
Kubernetes based on Jenkins Pipeline.

Summary
This report was meant as a hands-on, step-by-step guide for getting
started with building distributed systems with some popular Java
frameworks following a microservices approach. Microservices is
not a technology-only solution, as we discussed in the opening
chapter. People are the most important part of a complex system (a

Continuous Delivery | 109

business), and to scale and stay agile, you must consider scaling the
organizational structure as well as the technology systems involved.
After building microservices with whatever Java framework you
choose, you need to build, deploy, and manage them. Doing this at
scale using traditional techniques and primitives is overly complex,
costly, and does not scale. Fortunately, we can turn to new technolo‐
gies like Docker and Kubernetes that can help us build, deploy, and
operate while following best practices like immutable delivery.
When getting started with microservices built and deployed in
Docker and managed by Kubernetes, it helps to have a local envi‐
ronment used for development purposes. For this we recommend
the Red Hat Container Development Kit, which is a small, local VM
that has Red Hat OpenShift running inside a free edition of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux (RHEL). OpenShift provides a production-ready
Kubernetes distribution, and RHEL is a popular, secure, supported
operating system for running production workloads. This allows
you to develop applications using the same technologies that will be
running in production and take advantage of the application pack‐
aging and portability provided by Linux containers.
We’ve touched on a few additional important concepts to keep in
mind here, like configuration, logging, metrics, and continuous,
automated delivery. We didn’t touch on security, self-service, and
countless other topics, but make no mistake: they are very much a
part of the microservices story.
We hope you’ve found this report useful. Please follow @openshift,
@kubernetesio, @rhdevelopers, @rafabene, @christianposta, and
@RedHat on Twitter for more information, and take a look at the
source code repository.

110 | Chapter 8: Where Do We Go from Here?

About the Authors
Rafael Benevides (@rafabene) is a Director of Developer Experi‐
ence at Red Hat. With many years of experience in several fields of
the IT industry, he helps developers and companies all over the
world to be more effective in software development. Rafael is a com‐
mitter and PMC member of Apache DeltaSpike. He has been an
active speaker over the last three years at the major IT conferences
in the world and is a top author at the Red Hat Developer blog.
When not working, he enjoys building and flying RC airplanes and
drones, and also does 4x4 wheeling. He lives with his cat Gregory.
This book is dedicated to his passed-away son, João Gabriel, and to
Cynthia Azevedo for her support.
Christian Posta (@christianposta) is a Field CTO at solo.io and is
well known in the community for being an author (his books
include Istio in Action from Manning and Microservices for Java
Developers from O’Reilly), frequent blogger, speaker, open source
enthusiast, and committer on various open source projects, includ‐
ing Istio and Kubernetes. Christian has spent time at web-scale com‐
panies and now helps companies create and deploy large-scale,
resilient distributed architectures—many of them what we now call
serverless and microservices architectures. He enjoys mentoring,
training, and leading teams to be successful with distributed systems
concepts, microservices, DevOps, and cloud-native application
design.