Software Architecture with Spring 5.0

Design and architect highly scalable, robust, and high-performance Java applications

René Enríquez, Alberto Salazar

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788996730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Programación en Java

Discover how different software architectural models can help you solve problems, and learn best practices for the software development cycle

Key Features

• Learn concepts related to software architecture and embrace them using the latest features of Spring 5
• Discover architectural models and learn when to apply them
• Gain knowledge of architectural principles and how they can be used to provide accountability and rationale for architectural decisions

Book Description

Spring 5 and its ecosystem can be used to build robust architectures effectively. Software architecture is the underlying piece that helps us accomplish our business goals whilst supporting the features that a product demands. This book explains in detail how to choose the right architecture and apply best practices during your software development cycle to avoid technical debt and support every business requirement. Choosing the right architecture model to support your business requirements is one of the key decisions you need to take when a new product is being created from scratch or is being refactored to support new business demands. This book gives you insights into the most common architectural models and guides you when and where they can be used. During this journey, you'll see cutting-edge technologies surrounding the Spring products, and understand how to use agile techniques such as DevOps and continuous delivery to take your software to production effectively. By the end of this book, you'll not only know the ins and outs of Spring, but also be able to make critical design decisions that surpass your clients' expectations.

What you will learn

• Understand the key principles of software architecture
• Uncover the most common architectural models available
• Analyze scenarios where an architecture model should be used
• Implement agile techniques to take your software to production
• Secure the products you are working on
• Master tricks that will help you build high-performant applications
• Use cutting-edge technologies to build products

Who this book is for

If you're an experienced Spring developer aspiring to become an architect of enterprise-grade applications, this book is for you. It's also ideal for software architects who want to leverage Spring to create effective application blueprints.

Serverless Architectures

Serverless architectures are becoming a popular trend in IT system building. As a consequence, it's quite common to hear people discussing cloud providers such as Amazon Web services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, among others.

In this chapter, we will explore the meaning of serverless architecture and how this new way of building systems can help us to address business requirements in shorter amounts of time, thus reducing the effort required to build business solutions. We will also look at how this approach can be used to drastically reduce the time required to reach production by utilizing ready-to-use, third-party services and implementing custom functionalities, thereby creating stateless functions that can be deployed on the cloud.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• An introduction to serverless architecture
• Infrastructure and file storage
• Benefits and pitfalls
• Backend as a service
• Function as a service
• Concerns about serverless architectures:
  • Vendor lock-in concerns
  • Security concerns
  • Framework support
  • Troubleshooting
• Examples and commons uses of serverless architecture
• Implementing applications using serverless architecture:
  • How to write functions with Spring
  • Using adapters for AWS Lambda and Azure

An introduction to serverless architecture

Serverless architecture was born through the initiative of Amazon. The company was looking to promote an environment wherein a development team could be autonomous, small, and self-managed, allowing it to work on the whole software development cycle, from writing the code to shipping and delivering to production environments.

Serverless architecture is sometimes misunderstood as the concept of software systems that are deployed without the need for a physical server. To understand this idea, you can review the definition of serverless in Martin Fowler's blog:

"It's important to understand that a serverless architecture is the approach in which developers code business logic as functions, forgetting about the server's provisioning and scaling concerns where the logic will be executed."

- https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html

Common examples of serverless and FaaS include:

• Authentication
• SMS notifications
• Email services

On the other hand, within a serverless world, it's common to create applications in which third-party services are adopted as a part of the system (rather than creating services from scratch). These services are commonly known as backend as a service (BaaS) or mobile backend as a service (MBaaS).

Following the same approach, we can code our custom business logic in the form of functions that can be deployed on the cloud. These services are known as function as a service (FaaS).

The following diagram illustrates how third-party services and custom functions are created, deployed, and consumed by different software systems:

Third-party services and custom functions

Infrastructure and file storage

Infrastructure and file storage are also considered serverless, because the business (or person) that owns the system does not have to purchase, rent, or provision servers or virtual machines to use them.

As developers, if we take the old-fashioned approach (provisioning all of the infrastructure by using an on-premise environment), we have to set up all of the software and hardware requirements for every environment in which we want to deploy our software systems. This provisioning process has to be repeated for all of the environments, until we get into production, at which point we have to take care of other features, such as scaling and monitoring. In many cases, our infrastructure will be under-utilized, which is a waste of money, since we have purchased powerful servers to deploy applications that don't need many resources.

Benefits and pitfalls

Adopting a serverless architecture approach to creating applications provides us with many benefits, but there are also some pitfalls that we should address. Let's start by reviewing the benefits:

• Developers using a serverless architecture can focus primarily on the code, and can forget everything related to provisioning servers, which is a task handled by the cloud provider itself.
• The scaling of the code is ephemeral, meaning that it can be scaled and can spin up or down, based on the number of requests retrieved.
• By definition, all of the functions used to code the business logic must be stateless, and therefore, loosely coupled. In this way, the tasks are focused on well-defined responsibilities.
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