In this article, I’ll describe several best practices for building microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Security. I’m going to focus only on the aspects related to security. If you are interested in the general list of best practices for building microservices with Spring Boot read my article Spring Boot Best Practices for Microservices. On the other hand, if you plan to run your applications on Kubernetes, you might be interested in the article Best Practices For Microservices on Kubernetes.

Before we start with a list of security “golden rules”, let’s analyze a typical microservices architecture. We will focus on components important for building a secure solution.

The picture visible below illustrates a typical microservices architecture built with Spring Cloud. There is an API gateway built on top of Spring Cloud Gateway. Since it is an entry point to our system, we will enable some important security mechanisms on it. There are several microservices hidden behind the gateway. There is also a discovery server, which allows localizing IP addresses using the name of services. And finally, there are some components that do not take part in communication directly. It is just a proposition of a few selected tools. You may choose other solutions providing the same features. Vault is a tool for securely storing and accessing secrets. Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management solution. Spring Cloud Config Server provides an HTTP API for external configuration. It may integrate with several third-party tools including Vault.

Let’s begin. Here’s our list of Spring Security best practices.

Table of Contents

• 1. Enable rate limiting on the API gateway
• 2. Generate and propagate certificates dynamically
• 3. Use SSL in microservices communication
• 4. Keep configuration data encrypted
• 5. Restrict access to the API resources
• 6. Dynamically generate credentials to the external systems
• 7. Always be up to date
• Final thoughts

#microservices #spring boot #spring cloud #spring security