Ryan J. Baxter

After wrapping up part 5 of this tutorial, we had a fairly well rounded, yet simple, microservices application able to run locally on our machine.  However, our ultimate goal is to not run the application locally but instead run it in the cloud, after all we are building a cloud native application.  My cloud of choice is IBM Bluemix.  However, the changes described in this post should work in any Cloud Foundry deployment, but I have only tested them on Bluemix.  (Spring Cloud is not bias to any cloud platform, however the way you configure and deploy your Spring Cloud applications may depend on the cloud you are targeting.)

In this next section of the tutorial we will discuss a very important topic when it comes to microservice apps, circuit breakers.

After completing parts 1, 2, and 3 of this tutorial, we have a basic microservices application setup and running.  It is simple, but incorporates many of the mandates of being a cloud native application, so we are off to a good start.

In Parts 1 and 2 of this tutorial we have built an application which displays upcoming obstacle course races and the participants that will be running them.  We have addressed some common cloud native app challenges list cross domain requests and service discovery by using projects from Spring Cloud and Netflix, namely Eureka and Zuul.  In part 3 we will finish implementing the web UI of our application.

This week I gave a presentation at the local Bluemix meetup group on Docker containers and Bluemix.

In part 1 of this tutorial, I talked about some of the features of Spring Cloud and we started to build a microservice app that will display a list of obstacle course races.  At the end of part 1 we had three services/apps one which served race data, another which served race participant data, and the last which served our web app.  We ended part 1 when we ran into a cross domain issue when trying to make a request to our races service from our web service.

I had recently written a couple of blog posts about building cloud native applications and microservices.  Those blog posts were mostly high level overview posts, leaving out the low level implementation details.  This blog post will be a first in a series of blog posts where I will talk about some of my favorite technologies for building cloud native applications and give examples of how to use them.

Back in June I gave a session on Docker at Devoxx UK called Destination: Cloud. Deploying Applications To The Cloud With Docker.  Today Devoxx released the recording of my session on Parleys, you can view the video here.  Unfortunately you can only watch the first 5 minutes of the video with out registering for an account.  The good news if that you can register for an account very easily and for free.  This recording is a great compliment to a blog post I wrote a few weeks ago on the IBM Container service.  When I gave the session the IBM Container service in Bluemix was still in beta, but all of the content still applies to the service today so check it out!.

Back in March of this year I gave a session at DevNexus called Think Small To Go Big – An Introduction To Microservices.  Today DevNexus posted the video of the session I gave.  You can watch it below.  It is actually a great compliment to the past three blog posts I have written on Cloud Native apps and Microservices (Part 1 and Part 2).  This video actually includes a live demos of the application I referenced in my blog posts.  So if you want to see some of the benefits I talked about in my blog posts in action you should definitely check out the video.

In part 1 of this 2 part post, I described what microservices are and how I have gone about transitioning a 3-tier monolithic application to use a microservices architecture.  If you have not read part 1, I suggest you head back and read that now.  Also, if you have not read my post on building cloud native applications I suggest you check that out as well to better understand the bigger picture of why microservices are important when building cloud applications.