Exploring Spring Native

Demo Application to explore Spring Native.

Sample application to explore Spring Native Capabilities. Abbreviated version of something like bitly. Not for production use, yet! All persistence to in-memory H2 db. So, the application does bit more than Hello World type stuff, Source Code at!

Features / Spring Modules included

Spring Boot 2.4.x.
Spring Data JPA [Starter].
Spring Security [Starter] with JWT.
Spring Cloud Function [Starter].
Spring Boot Actuator.
Tomcat with SSL.
Exposing only REST endpoints.

Summary 03/25

Quick Start:

Get prebuilt native package from repo - note, the image is native to machine that built it - so it might not run on yours - see package details.

# requires graalvm locally installed.
$ ./com.dccorp.urlshortner.urlshortnerapplication

Or execute following to pull docker image:

# docker on local.
$ docker run -p 8080:8080 docker.pkg.github.com/chaudharydeepak/urlshortner/urlshortner:0.1

Detailed Instructions:

# checkout source code to local.

# native image plugin - ref pom.xml line 22-49, line 209-210
# requires GraalVM locally installed.
$ mvn -Pnative-image package
# execute generated native image
$ ./com.dccorp.urlshortner.urlshortnerapplication

# using buildpacks - ref pom.xml line 193-212
# requires docker local installation.
$ mvn spring-boot:build-image
# execute docker image 
$ docker run -p 8080:8080 urlshortner:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT

# after application starts [built either with buildpacks or native image plugin]
# register a new user
curl -k --location --request POST 'https://localhost:8080/signup' --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data-raw '{
    "firstName":"FName",
    "lastName":"LName",
    "userName":"userName",
    "password":"userPassword"
}'

# execute login endpoint to get JWT
curl -i -k --location --request POST 'https://localhost:8080/login' --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data-raw '{
    "userName":"userName",
    "password":"userPassword"
}' | grep Auth
# will print Auhtorization Header
Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzUxMiJ9.e.......

# use authorization header to access secured endpoint.
# basically we are creating a short url for a given url.
curl -k --location --request POST 'https://localhost:8080/create' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzUxMiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJjaGF1ZGhhcnlkZWVwYWswOEBnbWFpbC5jb20iLCJleHAiOjE2MTc2NDQzNzl9.eSfylYVUIgnOFbUULXG9yjUJuApPvgSKJCti_Jdv-XK-umVPPv7eYRgSm62K60vY89Sp_nRIWx6UOjEuNe5v6Q' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
    "requestURL":"https://docs.spring.io/spring-native/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/",
    "requestedShortCode":"nativedocs"
}'
#should see response like
{"statusCodeValue":201,"statusCode":"CREATED","body":{"shortURL":"stack",......

# try to see if short url works
$ curl -k -i https://localhost:8080/go/nativedocs
HTTP/1.1 302 
Vary: Origin
Vary: Access-Control-Request-Method
Vary: Access-Control-Request-Headers
Location: https://docs.spring.io/spring-native/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000 ; includeSubDomains
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Content-Length: 0
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 05:54:59 GMT

# to allow chrome access localhost self-signed certificate
# chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost

Key Learnings

Native image startup time is ~0.55s vs ~4.5s [executable jar] subjective to machine, which is pretty cool.
The Generated native image is around ~182M [using buildpacks] vs ~148M [native image plugin] vs ~40M [jar - of-course since JVM is provided outside of the jar on running machine].
Startup time is almost instantaneous - but build time is significantly higher - which possibly will improve over time as the project matures.
Not all Spring modules /projects are supported yet - for ex. developer tools / AOP support missing [03/25] - things in motion already.
Need significant RAM on the machine to play with Native support in the first place.
No Out-of-the-box native image generation for pre-existing Spring Boot application - tweeks / testing will be required - though in long run that is the goal.
Size of native image could be further reduced by using tools like upx.

  $ ls -lh | grep url
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 deepak.chaudhary  staff   148M Mar 27 00:00 com.dccorp.urlshortner.urlshortnerapplication
  -rw-r--r--   1 deepak.chaudhary  staff    38M Mar 26 23:47 urlshortner-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-exec.jar
  -rw-r--r--   1 deepak.chaudhary  staff    76K Mar 26 23:47 urlshortner-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

  $ upx -7 -k com.dccorp.urlshortner.urlshortnerapplication

  $ ls -lh | grep url # size reduced to 43M from 148M which is amazing.
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 deepak.chaudhary  staff    43M Mar 27 00:00 com.dccorp.urlshortner.urlshortnerapplication
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 deepak.chaudhary  staff   148M Mar 27 00:00 com.dccorp.urlshortner.urlshortnerapplicatio~
  -rw-r--r--   1 deepak.chaudhary  staff    38M Mar 26 23:47 urlshortner-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-exec.jar
  -rw-r--r--   1 deepak.chaudhary  staff    76K Mar 26 23:47 urlshortner-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

Further image size could be reduced by using trimmed down tomcat [experimental] - ref pom.xml line 118.
Oracle provides GraalVM Dashboard online tool to peek inside native image.

  -H:DashboardDump=dumpfileoversizedbuildArgs
  -H:+DashboardAll

Only available when using native image plugin and not buildpacks to generate native image.
GraalVM Dashboard

You can use dive tool to inspect generated docker image:
Need to watchful around anything that's reflection. AOT[Ahead-Of-Time] compilation is actually analyzing the entire application during build time[hence increased build time] - so it might miss some classes whose instantiation is decided at actual runtime instead[lazy], though there is hint support available to take care of these situations.
Very good support from Community / good documentation Spring Native and GraalVM.
Follow open issue with possible Development Process #651.

Blog

Exploring Spring Native

Deepak Chaudhary

Demo Application to explore Spring Native.

Sample application to explore Spring Native Capabilities. Abbreviated version of something like bitly. Not for production use, yet! All persistence to in-memory H2 db. So, the application does bit more than Hello World type stuff, Source Code at!

Features / Spring Modules included

Summary 03/25

Quick Start:

Detailed Instructions:

Key Learnings

Links

Feel free to share / leave your thoughts!

Join Our Newsletter. No Spam, Only the good stuff.

Related