Local Java Development on Kubernetes

There are many tools, which may simplify your local development on Kubernetes. For Java applications you may also take an advantage of integration between popular runtime frameworks and Kubernetes. In this article I’m going to present some of available solutions.

Guide To Micronaut Kubernetes

Micronaut provides a library that eases development of applications deployed on Kubernetes or on a local single-node cluster like Minikube. The project Micronaut Kubernetes is relatively new in Micronaut family, its current release version is 1.0.3. It allows you to integrate Micronaut application with Kubernetes discovery, and use Micronaut Configuration Client to read Kubernetes ConfigMap and Secret as a property sources. Additionally it provides health check indicator based on communication with Kubernetes API.

Micronaut Tutorial: Reactive

This is the fourth part of my tutorial to Micronaut Framework – created after a longer period of time. In this article I’m going to show you some examples of reactive programming on the server and client side. By default, Micronaut support to reactive APIs and streams is built on top of RxJava.

Part 1: Testing Kafka Microservices With Micronaut

I have already described how to build microservices architecture entirely based on message-driven communication through Apache Kafka in one of my previous articles Kafka In Microservices With Micronaut. As you can see in the article title the sample applications and integration with Kafka has been built on top of Micronaut Framework. I described some interesting features of Micronaut, that can be used for building message-driven microservices, but I specially didn’t write anything about testing. In this article I’m going to show you how to test your Kafka microservice using Micronaut Test core features (Component Tests), Testcontainers (Integration Tests) and Pact (Contract Tests).

Kafka In Microservices With Micronaut

Today we are going to build some microservices communicating with each other asynchronously through Apache Kafka topics. We use Micronaut Framework, which provides dedicated library for integration with Kafka. Let’s take a brief look at the architecture of our sample system. We have 4 microservices: order-service, trip-service, driver-service and passenger-service. The implementation of these applications is very simple. All of them have in-memory storage and connect to the same Kafka instance.

JPA Data Access with Micronaut Data

When I have writing some articles comparing Spring and Micronaut frameworks recently, I have taken a note of many comments about lack of built-in ORM and data repositories support in Micronaut. Spring provides this feature for a long time through Spring Data project. The good news is that the Micronaut team is close to complete work on first version of their project with ORM support. The project called Micronaut Predator (short for Precomputed Data Repositories) is still under active development, and currently we may access just the snapshot version. However, the authors are introducing it is as more efficient with reduced memory consumption than competitive solutions like Spring Data or Grails GORM. In short, this could be achieved thanks to Ahead of Time (AoT) compilation to pre-compute queries for repository interfaces that are then executed by a thin, lightweight runtime layer, and avoiding usage of reflection or runtime proxies.

Micronaut Tutorial: Security

This is the third part of my tutorial to Micronaut Framework. This time we will discuss the most interesting Micronaut security features. I have already described core mechanisms for IoC and dependency injection in the first part of my tutorial, and I have also created a guide to building simple REST server-side application in the second part. For more details you may refer to:

• Part 1: Micronaut Tutorial: Beans and Scopes
• Part 2: Micronaut Tutorial: Server Application

Micronaut Tutorial: Server Application

In this part of my tutorial to Micronaut framework we are going to create simple HTTP server-side application running on Netty. We have already discussed the most interesting core features of Micronaut like beans, scopes or unit testing in the first part of that tutorial. For more details you may refer to my article Micronaut Tutorial: Beans and Scopes.

Assuming we have a basic knowledge about core mechanisms of Micronaut we may proceed to the key part of that framework and discuss how to build simple microservice application exposing REST API over HTTP.

Micronaut Tutorial: Beans and Scopes

Micronaut is a relatively new JVM-based framework. It is especially designed for building modular, easy testable microservice applications. Micronaut is heavily inspired by Spring and Grails frameworks, which is not a surprise, if we consider it has been developed by the creators of Grails framework. It is based on Java’s annotation processing, IoC (Inversion of Control) and DI (Dependency Injection).

Micronaut implements the JSR-330 (java.inject) specification for dependency injection. It supports constructor injection, field injection, JavaBean and method parameter injection. In this part of tutorial I’m going to give some tips on how to:

• define and register beans in the application context
• use built-in scopes
• inject configuration to your application
• automatically test your beans during application build with JUnit 5

Performance Comparison Between Spring Boot and Micronaut

Today we will compare two frameworks used for building microservices on the JVM: Spring Boot and Micronaut. First of them, Spring Boot is currently the most popular and opinionated framework in the JVM world. On the other side of the barrier is staying Micronaut, quickly gaining popularity framework especially designed for building serverless functions or low memory-footprint microservices. We will be comparing version 2.1.4 of Spring Boot with 1.0.0.RC1 of Micronaut. The comparison criteria are:

• memory usage (heap and non-heap)
• the size in MB of generated fat JAR file
• the application startup time
• the performance of application, in the meaning of average response time from the REST endpoint during sample load testing

Kotlin Microservices with Micronaut, Spring Cloud and JPA

Micronaut Framework provides support for Kotlin built upon Kapt compiler plugin. It also implements the most popular cloud-native patterns like distributed configuration, service discovery and client-side load balancing. These features allows to include your application built on top of Micronaut into the existing microservices-based system. The most popular example of such approach may be an integration with Spring Cloud ecosystem. If you have already used Spring Cloud, it is very likely you built your microservices-based architecture using Eureka discovery server and Spring Cloud Config as a configuration server. Beginning from version 1.1 Micronaut supports both these popular tools being a part of Spring Cloud project. That’s a good news, because in version 1.0 the only supported distributed solution was Consul, and there were no possibility to use Eureka discovery together with Consul property source (running them together ends with exception).

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.