Emily Jiang - Practical Cloud-Native Java Development with MicroProfile: Develop and deploy scalable, resilient, and reactive cloud-native applications using MicroProfile 4.1

Develop and deploy scalable, resilient, and reactive cloud-native applications using MicroProfile 4.1

Emily Jiang

Andrew McCright

John Alcorn

David Chan

Alasdair Nottingham

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

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To my husband, Francis Yang, for his love, endless support, and managing our house-building project while I was writing this book. To my sweet daughter, Emma Yang, for her support and looking after her younger brother. To my adorable son, Adam Yang, for his understanding and unconditional love.

Emily Jiang

To my wife, Jamie, for always supporting me and believing in me. And to my three kids, who sacrificed time with their dad for more than a few nights and weekends.

Andrew McCright

To my wife, Rebecca, for her support throughout the writing of this book, and across the decades. And to all those who contributed over the years to the creation of the Stock Trader cloud-native application.

John Alcorn

To my lovely partner in crime, Stephanie Van, for always being there for me. Also, to our dog, Milo. You're the bestest doggo ever.

David Chan

To all the people who have contributed to making Java, Jakarta EE, and MicroProfile a success.

Alasdair Nottingham

Whenever there are significant shifts in computing architectures, we find the need to adapt and to evolve application architectures and the toolboxes leveraged by developers. These toolboxes need to be sensitive to the shifts and enable their exploitation, not just toleration.

Cloud computing and microservices offer an opportunity to build applications differently than in the past. For example, scaling is more economical and practical with the presence of pay-as-you-go cloud resources such as compute and storage. But given the nature of the applications being constructed and evolved, scalability is expected and it is supposed to efficiently leverage those resources. The developers role in leveraging cloud-provider native services, managing reliability and robustness as well as keeping track of all the moving parts that go with a microservices-based approach requires new thinking that starts with your programming language and how you use it. Those moving parts are then placed into an agile DevOps world where the velocity of each iteration is expected to improve. Practical Cloud-Native Java development with MicroProfile provides a broad and deep look at the relevant topics you need to consider as you and your organization ramp up cloud adoption and tackle application portfolio modernization.

Since the early days of Java, there have been frameworks that have been created and matured to enable large-scale consumption of the technology at scale for a variety of application architectures. The earliest J2EE specifications, the JEE era and Jakarta work, provide substance and insight as we now address the new normal of cloud computing. MicroProfile is accelerating the maturation of techniques and offering a path forward from the prior thinking that helped make Java a staple in most large organizations. The authors of this book bring with them years and years of experience from both the middleware definition and implementation side of the business and from the application side, having worked with countless clients to demonstrate the art of the possible and bring new business systems to life. I know they have saved me several times when clear precise technical answers were needed quickly.

In my own work with customers back in the early 2000s, I often would say that the next great legacy would be that of Java code. In recent years, it has become obvious that this is the case. There are a lot of core mission-critical applications built on Java and JEE, each representing the standards and patterns representative of the era in which they were created. Many have evolved to a state of being complex to change and to a state of being considered monolithic. With the expectations of increased velocity combined with the notion of what is now more practical because of cloud architectures and because of orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes, the challenge is set, that is for sure.

While that might all sound familiar and reasonable, it might lead you to ask questions such as what is the north star that you want to modernize toward? Or, you might ask how one goes about simplifying developers tasks while not hiding the realities of this new world. MicroProfile can be at the center of the programming model part of that north star. MicroProfile, its features, and the practical guidance you will find in the chapters that lie ahead allow you to consistently tackle these modernization challenges in a safe and simple way. Things such as health checks and liveness/readiness settings (MicroProfile Health) are examples that come to mind for me. They are part of this whole notion of observability and monitoring, which is essential in dynamic cloud-based environments. MicroProfile Health and MicroProfile Metrics are the basis of this. MicroProfile provides structure and support that enables your microservices with minimal effort on the part of the programmer, yet yields valuable insights for the SREs that play a vital role in agile development. That is from a technical perspective.

Given the openness of the approach to defining and evolving MicroProfile, there is also less risk of vendor lock-in, not to mention a great environment for incubating innovation both in specification and implementation. This is what we need. This way, you can get on with the reason we do this application stuff in the first place, the business value offered by the features youre working on creating or evolving.

If you are like me and struggle to consume abstract architectural pictures and conceptual guidance that isnt backed by real code and told in the voice of someone who has done it, you will enjoy reading this book. In this book, you will find the concepts that are necessary for the cloud architectures we aspire to all supported by concrete examples. That is the recipe. Please enjoy this book and all it has to offer.