Craig Walls

Cloud Native Spring

8:30 AM MDT

In this session, we'll explore Spring Cloud, the extension to Spring which addresses many of the common challenges of developing cloud native applications. We'll focus primarily on Spring Cloud's support for centralized configuration, service discovery, and failover/monitoring.

You wouldn't write your entire application in a single main() method or servlet. Nor would you develop an entire production-ready application in a single class. It's even unlikely that you'd cram everything into a single package.

Modularity helps us gain order in our code, breaking it into easily digestible, refactorable, pluggable, and testable chunks. Classes and methods are a form of modularity that we're all familiar with. But once the code is built, modularity goes away and we're left deploying a single WAR file.

Aside from being buzzword-compliant, Microservices are a means of defining entire systems from composable, but distinct deployment units gaining all of the benefits of finer-grained modularity.

Microservices present new challenges to developers, however. How do you configure your microservices? How are microservices discovered? And how can you avoid a cascading failure when one microservice becomes sluggish, unresponsive, or otherwise unhealthy?

Cloud Native Spring UIs

10:30 AM MDT

In this session, we look at how to develop clients that consume microservices in the cloud. We'll look at how to solve challenges of cross-origin request sharing (without employing CORS), security, and loose-coupling with regard to service addresses. This session will build upon what was learned in “Cloud Native Spring”, adding the notion of a service gateway to the stack.

Once you've developed the microservices that back your cloud native application, you'll likely need to put a user interface up front. Suddenly a new array of challenges presents itself.

• How do clients (JavaScript or native mobile) discover those services?
• How do clients consume those services without compromising the scalability of the services?
• How can the clients consume the services securely?
• Microservices will be scattered across multiple hosts/ports. How can a JavaScript client overcome the cross-origin issues imposed by the browser? (Hint: It doesn't necessarily involve CORS.)

Cloud Native Data Integration

1:00 PM MDT

In this session, we'll look at Spring Cloud Data Flow, a cloud native programming and operating model for composable data microservices on a structured platform.

Microservices are commonly thought of as small REST-based services that are assembled to form a larger, more complete application. In reality, however, REST is only the communication mechanism which is only a implementation detail and not intrinsic to the notion of microservices.

Meanwhile, data processing and integration between various components of an application and external services is a key factor of many applications. In cloud native applications, this kind of data flow and processing is still relevant. Spring Cloud Data Flow offers a solution for data processing and integration where each step in the flow is, in fact, a microservice…but not necessarily a REST service.

Spring Boot and Beyond

2:45 PM MDT

In this session, we'll open the hood on Spring Boot and see how it works. Using this knowledge, we'll look at ways to optimize Spring Boot, override autoconfiguration, and create custom extensions to Spring Boot's Actuator.

Spring Boot does many wonderful things that get you well on your way to developing amazing Spring applications. But how does it tick? How can you customize it? And how can you override it's default autoconfiguration when you want something a little different?

Spring Security Rebooted

4:30 PM MDT

Security is an important aspect of any application. For many years, Spring Security has been the go-to framework for securing Spring-based application. But historically Spring Security has been cumbersome to work with, involving an enormous amount of XML configuration to shape an application's security scheme.

In recent versions of Spring Security, however, XML-based configuration has taken a backseat to a powerful Java-based configuration option. Spring Security's Java-based configuration offers a fluent API for defining the security constraints for an application which is easy to read and eliminates the need for klunky XML configuration. On top of Spring Security's own configuration improvements, Spring Boot autoconfiguration makes it incredibly easy to get started securing your application, minimizing even the amount of Java configuration required.

In this session, we'll take a look at what's involved in securing a Spring application with Spring Security. In doing so, we'll take full advantage of Spring Boot to autoconfigure as much security as we can get away with and then rely solely on Spring Security's Java-based configuration to shape the security aspect of an application. We'll also briefly look at how to use Spring Security when securing microservices.