Spring Boot with Embedded Tomcat Pros and Cons

Spring Boot with Embedded Tomcat Pros and Cons. When you build your web service using Spring Boot, the default setup is to generate a .jar file. The .jar - The web servers can be Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow [1]. I’m going to focus on Tomcat.

Zuul gateway and spring-boot-admin to the rescue

If you work with web services in Java, chances are you work with Spring Boot as well or at least is considering it.

When you build your web service using Spring Boot the default setup is to generate a .jar file. The .jar comes with a web server embedded, and you just need to execute it to have the application up and running. The web servers can be Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow [1]. I’m going to focus on Tomcat.

It’s also possible to use Spring Boot and deploy as a .war file. That’s how I’m more accustomed to it. It feels more natural to me. It’s how I learned — one single Tomcat installation in the server, with multiple applications deployed as .war files.

In this article, I’m going to address the pros and cons of building a Spring Boot application with an embedded Tomcat. It’s the best way (in my view) if you are working with  Microservices.

Pros

The pros are not an extensive list, but they are quite significant.

1. Isolation

For me, this is the driving force. Isolation means that the applications are not dependent on a single Tomcat installation. If the  embedded Tomcat in service A fails, it won’t impact service B or C as each one has its own  Tomcat. Unless the services call each other (which it shouldn’t )— but that’s a different problem. With one single Tomcat, with services calling each other or not, if the Tomcat is shut down, all services are impacted.

Such isolation also means that using Docker may be overkill (don’t beat me just yet). I’ve never used Docker, to be honest, I don’t feel comfortable elaborating too much on this argument. I’m pretty sure it provides many benefits. Based on what I’ve read, it involves much more than just building an application with embedded Tomcat.

java microservices tomcat spring-boot

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Learn how to create a Reactive Java Microservices Architecture using Spring Boot and JHipster. Spring Boot 2.0 introduced a new web framework called Spring WebFlux. WebFlux offers a way for developers to do reactive programming. Java has been at the forefront of microservice architectures since they came to prominence a few years ago. It’s a popular language with well-known, high-quality frameworks, like Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Data, and Spring Security.