As the demand for software rises, IT industries worldwide have adopted microservices architecture to reduce the turnaround time. In laymen’s language, microservices is an architectural approach to software development where the software is composed of small independent services. Each of these services can be developed independently.
Big enterprises like Netflix, Amazon, Uber, Etsy have all adopted microservices architecture to reach new heights of scalability. The process of adopting microservices is also fairly simple. Developers need to pick up the right framework that has all the necessary integrated tools to build a performant application. The picked framework, in the long run, will determine the cost of development, ease of handling, and maintenance in the long run.

There are a plethora of microservices frameworks to work with. Spring, Golang, Quarkus, Micronaut, Ballerina are the name of few. In this article, I will be sharing with you a few reasons why I consider Spring to be the optimal choice for developing microservices applications.

What is spring?

Released in June 2003, Spring or “Spring Boot” is one of the most used Java microservices frameworks with approximately 60.2k stars on GitHub. Powered by Spring Cloud, Spring boot allows developers to build software components that are self-contained and offers flexibility to your code.

Spring is considered to be a secure, low-cost, and flexible framework that improves coding efficiency and reduces overall application development time because it is lightweight.

Why one should use spring for microservices?

Uses Java POJOs

A POJO class is created to use the same objects in other Java programs. The major advantage of using a POJO class is to omit the redundancy of object creation in other Java programs. We can access the objects by using get() and set() methods.

Spring framework leverages Java POJOs, which makes it much easier to build enterprise-class applications as compared to heavyweight EJBs.

Dependency Injection

Spring framework relies on dependency injection to simply specify dependencies via configuration files instead of hard coding the dependencies of an object. This is possible due to the fact that in Spring two classes are usually loosely coupled with each other.

Aspect-Oriented Programming

Spring allows you to separate cross-cutting concerns with the business logic. Cross-cutting concerns span across different parts of the application and affect the entire application.
AOP tries to tackle this problem by allowing us to express crosscutting concerns in "aspects," which are stand-alone modules.

For example, a security module “aspect” can include “advice” that performs a security check and a “join point,” which defines when in the corresponding program the aspect code should be executed.
This can be done using XML syntax or syntax based on “AspectJ,” which uses Java code.

Spring Architecture

Modular programming is a software design technique that divides a program's functionality into distinct modules, each of which comprises a single function. Spring is organized in a modular form, allowing you to focus solely on the modules that you require while ignoring the others. It is comprised of about 20 modules. These modules suffice developers with everything they need for developing enterprise applications.

Conclusion

As the industry shifted from monolithic to microservices architecture, the rise for perfect framework grew at large. Spring is such a mature framework that is in existence for a long time and doesn’t fail to comply with the new industry standards and features that other frameworks are providing. Being lightweight and having backed by a vast community, our organizations leveraged it to its maximum potential. Do you consider any other framework to be the best fit for your organizational needs? Let us know in the comments below.