Testing Spring Boot Integration with Vault and Postgres using Testcontainers Framework

I have already written many articles, where I was using Docker containers for running some third-party solutions integrated with my sample applications. Building integration tests for such applications may not be an easy task without Docker containers. Especially, if our application integrates with databases, message brokers or some other popular tools. If you are planning to build such integration tests you should definitely take a look on Testcontainers (https://www.testcontainers.org/). Testcontainers is a Java library that supports JUnit tests, providing fast and lightweight way for running instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container. It provides modules for the most popular relational and NoSQL databases like Postgres, MySQL, Cassandra or Neo4j. It also allows to run popular products like Elasticsearch, Kafka, Nginx or HashiCorp’s Vault. Today I’m going to show you more advanced sample of JUnit tests that use Testcontainers to check out an integration between Spring Boot/Spring Cloud application, Postgres database and Vault. For the purposes of that example we will use the case described in one of my previous articles Secure Spring Cloud Microservices with Vault and Nomad. Let us recall that use case.

Quick Guide to Microservices with Micronaut Framework

Micronaut framework has been introduced as an alternative to Spring Boot for building microservice applications. At first glance it is very similar to Spring. It also implements such patterns like dependency injection and inversion of control based on annotations, however it uses JSR-330 (java.inject) for doing it. It has been designed specially in order to building serverless functions, Android applications, and low memory-footprint microservices. This means that it should faster startup time, lower memory usage or easier unit testing than competitive frameworks. However, today I don’t want to focus on those characteristics of Micronaut. I’m going to show you how to build simple microservices-based system using this framework. You can easily compare it with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud by reading my previous article about the same subject Quick Guide to Microservices with Spring Boot 2.0, Eureka and Spring Cloud. Does Micronaut have a change to gain the same popularity as Spring Boot? Let’s find out.

Kotlin Microservice with Spring Boot

You may find many examples of microservices built with Spring Boot on my blog, but the most of them is written in Java. With the rise in popularity of Kotlin language it is more often used with Spring Boot for building backend services. Starting with version 5 Spring Framework has introduced first-class support for Kotlin. In this article I’m going to show you example of microservice build with Kotlin and Spring Boot 2. I’ll describe some interesting features of Spring Boot, which can treated as a set of good practices when building backend, REST-based microservices.

Running Java Microservices on OpenShift using Source-2-Image

One of the reason you would prefer OpenShift instead of Kubernetes is the simplicity of running new applications. When working with plain Kubernetes you need to provide already built image together with the set of descriptor templates used for deploying it. OpenShift introduces Source-2-Image feature used for building reproducible Docker images from application source code. With S2I you don’t have provide any Kubernetes YAML templates or build Docker image by yourself, OpenShift will do it for you. Let’s see how it works. The best way to test it locally is via Minishift. But the first step is to prepare sample applications source code.