In the previous chapter, we learned how to communicate between different systems using AMQP messaging with RabbitMQ as our broker.
In this day and age, teams around the world are discovering that constantly tacking on more and more functionality is no longer effective after a certain point. Domains become blurred, coupling between various systems makes things resistant to change, and different teams are forced to hold more and more meetings to avoid breaking various parts of the system, sometimes, for the tiniest of changes.
Emerging from all this malaise are microservices. The term microservice is meant to connote a piece of software that doesn't attempt to solve too many problems, but a targeted situation instead. Its scope is microscopic when compared with the existing behemoth monoliths that litter the horizon.
And that's where Spring Cloud steps in. By continuing the paradigm of autoconfiguration, Spring Cloud extends Spring Boot into the realm of cloud-native microservices, making the development of distributed microservices quite practical.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- A quick primer on microservices
- Dynamically registering and finding services with Eureka
- Introducing @SpringCloudApplication
- Calling one microservice from another with client-side load balancing
- Implementing microservice circuit breakers
- Monitoring circuits
- Offloading microservice settings to a configuration server