As we have seen in this chapter, Spring Boot was introduced in order to simplify development with Spring Framework. It acts as the glue for Spring components and gives reasonable default configurations based on application dependencies. With version 2, it also provides excellent support for the reactive stack. This chapter skips many details regarding Spring Framework improvements, but instead covers how Spring Boot helps us to obtain all the benefits of reactive with ease.

However, we will go into the features and enhancements introduced in Spring 5.x in depth in the following chapters, starting with an examination of the Spring WebFlux module and comparing this with good old Spring WebMVC.