1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,560 Welcome back after an elongated break to the Cloud Native in 15 Minutes podcast. 2 00:00:04,940 --> 00:00:07,580 If you haven't listened before, the goal of the podcast is simple, 3 00:00:07,760 --> 00:00:11,560 to explain some complex but increasingly important technologies and topics 4 00:00:11,560 --> 00:00:14,180 and about the time it takes for a coffee break or a short commute. 5 00:00:14,720 --> 00:00:17,320 Usually it takes a little more than 15 minutes, but not much. 6 00:00:17,800 --> 00:00:20,900 I'm Derek Harris from VMware, which still sounds a little weird. 7 00:00:21,200 --> 00:00:25,280 And today's topic is Spring, the open source job development framework 8 00:00:25,280 --> 00:00:27,440 that still gets over a million downloads a month, 9 00:00:27,440 --> 00:00:30,080 and more specifically, Spring Cloud. 10 00:00:30,460 --> 00:00:34,160 Joining me to explain it is Spencer Gibb, a staff engineer at VMware 11 00:00:34,160 --> 00:00:36,640 and co-founder and lead for Spring Cloud. 12 00:00:36,940 --> 00:00:41,440 Now we start off a little slow, but stick with it because it gets really informational 13 00:00:41,440 --> 00:00:45,060 and Spencer shares some great insights into how Spring Cloud simplifies 14 00:00:45,060 --> 00:00:47,720 and expedites the process of building distributed applications 15 00:00:47,720 --> 00:00:52,020 and why that's important, not just for developers, but also for CIOs and other execs 16 00:00:52,020 --> 00:00:55,600 who made developer productivity a key tenet of their modernization efforts. 17 00:00:56,000 --> 00:00:59,240 And the interview with Spencer will begin in just a few seconds 18 00:00:59,240 --> 00:01:03,560 after I remind you to please leave a review for the podcast on your platform of choice. 19 00:01:03,720 --> 00:01:04,740 It's very helpful. 20 00:01:05,160 --> 00:01:05,520 Thanks. 21 00:01:06,840 --> 00:01:07,920 All right, Spencer. 22 00:01:08,280 --> 00:01:12,980 So to get started, can you quick walk listeners who are unfamiliar with Spring, 23 00:01:13,100 --> 00:01:16,180 like walking them through what is Spring and why is it so popular? 24 00:01:18,180 --> 00:01:24,820 Spring is a Java application framework started 18 or 19 years ago, 25 00:01:25,120 --> 00:01:30,880 kind of as a response to the complexity of the J2EE model. 26 00:01:31,960 --> 00:01:38,840 It includes a dependency injection container as well as a web framework, 27 00:01:39,120 --> 00:01:41,160 messaging framework and things like that. 28 00:01:41,400 --> 00:01:45,480 And why, I mean, Spring is used by like tens of millions of developers. 29 00:01:46,200 --> 00:01:52,080 What does it bring to the table, I guess, that other Java application frameworks didn't 30 00:01:52,080 --> 00:01:55,840 or that you're not going to get from just writing straight up Java code? 31 00:01:56,640 --> 00:02:02,360 One of the goals of the Spring philosophy is to eliminate boilerplate. 32 00:02:02,940 --> 00:02:06,960 Maybe in today's words, eliminate toil, right? 33 00:02:07,320 --> 00:02:10,100 Things you do manually over and over and over. 34 00:02:10,500 --> 00:02:15,220 Let someone else whose core competency is that do that for you. 35 00:02:15,380 --> 00:02:20,720 And then you can focus on what makes your particular project unique. 36 00:02:21,380 --> 00:02:23,380 So what are some of the examples like that? 37 00:02:23,440 --> 00:02:25,660 So, I mean, we'll get into Spring Cloud in a moment. 38 00:02:25,760 --> 00:02:32,040 But what is like a real quick example of, if I'm not using Spring or I'm curious about it, 39 00:02:32,040 --> 00:02:36,100 I'm trying to empower my developers, like what's a real fast, easy example of, 40 00:02:36,580 --> 00:02:39,500 hey, we're using this and now we've reduced this toil, right? 41 00:02:39,540 --> 00:02:40,940 We've minimized this effort. 42 00:02:40,940 --> 00:02:44,320 It could be a number of things with framework. 43 00:02:44,660 --> 00:02:50,120 Some simple ones that come to mind are things like Web Client, 44 00:02:50,560 --> 00:02:59,960 which is kind of an HTTP agnostic, HTTP client agnostic framework for making restful calls to other services. 45 00:03:00,520 --> 00:03:08,880 It's really elegant and really well done and is typical of the patterns that the framework provides for other things. 46 00:03:08,880 --> 00:03:21,240 So they have things for making HTTP calls, making JDBC calls, making messaging calls, whether that's JMS or AMQP or whatever. 47 00:03:21,460 --> 00:03:25,000 There's this idea of making those things simple to do. 48 00:03:25,540 --> 00:03:30,080 The other thing, just for anyone who's not well-versed in the world of Spring, it's a Spring Boot. 49 00:03:30,660 --> 00:03:37,700 Can you quickly just, because we hear that a lot, especially if you attend like any pivotal conference, you'll hear about Spring Boot an awful lot. 50 00:03:37,740 --> 00:03:40,340 So can you quickly walk through what is Spring Boot? 51 00:03:41,140 --> 00:03:41,440 Sure. 52 00:03:41,620 --> 00:03:55,800 I mean, the way you used to deploy a Spring application was in some kind of container, whether that was a simple servlet container like Tomcat or some monolithic Java EE container. 53 00:03:55,800 --> 00:04:06,080 So you're creating wars or ears, and there was lots of XML, and that part of it was still painful. 54 00:04:06,380 --> 00:04:11,340 The writing code part was much, much better, but the deployment was absolutely painful. 55 00:04:11,600 --> 00:04:24,000 So probably the most popular framework that popularized the idea and one of the 12-factor tenets is that your application should just be that. 56 00:04:24,200 --> 00:04:28,280 It should just be an executable and listens on a port. 57 00:04:29,440 --> 00:04:36,260 And so there were a number of things that came together to create Spring Boot, one of those being embedded containers. 58 00:04:36,260 --> 00:04:44,880 So you have Tomcat and Jetty and Undertow and now Netty that are just libraries that Spring Boot can consume. 59 00:04:45,600 --> 00:04:55,640 And so now, instead of deploying to a war, it's a simple Java application, and you just Java-Jar start your app, and it listens on a port. 60 00:04:56,280 --> 00:05:00,080 There are other things that make deploying simpler with boot. 61 00:05:00,300 --> 00:05:04,940 External configuration, so the ability to configure your projects. 62 00:05:05,540 --> 00:05:23,540 And then auto-configuration, so based on your class path, you include some, what the boot team calls a starter, and it brings in a curated set of dependencies and enables that functionality in an automated way, usually driven by configuration. 63 00:05:23,920 --> 00:05:33,440 So, for example, there are starters for JDBC, for RabbitMQ, just for web framework pieces, for example. 64 00:05:34,360 --> 00:05:37,660 So that makes dependency management much, much easier. 65 00:05:38,200 --> 00:05:43,980 So all in all, it makes getting an application up and running a trivial exercise. 66 00:05:44,500 --> 00:05:44,700 All right. 67 00:05:45,020 --> 00:05:48,280 Again, that seems to be an important piece of the puzzle. 68 00:05:49,220 --> 00:05:54,380 Spring, yeah, Spring Cloud couldn't have existed without Spring Boot first. 69 00:05:54,720 --> 00:05:54,980 Okay. 70 00:05:55,880 --> 00:05:57,600 So, yeah, let's get into Spring Cloud. 71 00:05:57,700 --> 00:06:00,640 What was the impetus for developing Spring Cloud? 72 00:06:00,780 --> 00:06:04,160 And then let's start with that, and then we'll get into the various pieces of it. 73 00:06:04,680 --> 00:06:12,780 Kind of from my side, at the time, I was not a then-pivotal employee, but I was doing work in the cloud. 74 00:06:13,280 --> 00:06:22,640 And when you're building distributed systems, there are certain problems that are fairly common among them. 75 00:06:23,060 --> 00:06:38,880 So the idea with Spring Cloud was to, again, eliminate some of the toil and boilerplate initiative that is involved with overcoming those problems and allow those kinds of things to be easily dealt with by developers. 76 00:06:38,880 --> 00:06:44,120 When I look at Spring Cloud, there are a number of various subcomponents, right? 77 00:06:44,180 --> 00:06:47,700 There's Spring Cloud for basically every cloud provider platform. 78 00:06:47,840 --> 00:06:49,000 There's Spring Cloud Dataflow. 79 00:06:49,140 --> 00:06:50,520 There's Spring Cloud Streaming. 80 00:06:50,940 --> 00:06:52,920 There's Spring Cloud Kubernetes. 81 00:06:53,060 --> 00:06:54,860 There's a wide variety of modules or whatever. 82 00:06:54,960 --> 00:06:58,840 What are some of the key pieces if you're going to be using Spring Cloud to write apps? 83 00:06:58,940 --> 00:07:02,200 And what are, like, maybe just like, why are these the pieces? 84 00:07:02,360 --> 00:07:07,080 Why have we settled on this handful of maybe a dozen or two? 85 00:07:07,080 --> 00:07:07,780 Sure. 86 00:07:08,200 --> 00:07:18,280 Initially, Spring Cloud was a set of interfaces that implemented certain concepts that are common in distributed systems. 87 00:07:18,600 --> 00:07:30,020 So service registration and discovery, distributed configuration, circuit breakers, and some other strategies for dealing with failure in the cloud. 88 00:07:30,020 --> 00:07:33,500 And as we progressed, things expanded. 89 00:07:33,500 --> 00:07:50,440 So Stream is, with Spring Boot, it's fairly easy to have a HTTP-based service using Spring Framework and Spring MVC or WebFlux, and you get a simple application. 90 00:07:50,640 --> 00:07:56,500 So Stream brought message-based services in a simple manner. 91 00:07:56,500 --> 00:08:11,900 And then taking that concept even further, Dataflow is then, okay, now that I can create these little independent consumers and or producers of data, 92 00:08:12,340 --> 00:08:17,100 now I want to create declarative pipelines of them. 93 00:08:17,240 --> 00:08:19,040 How should my data flow through a system? 94 00:08:19,040 --> 00:08:22,960 And it very much looks like a Unix command line. 95 00:08:23,140 --> 00:08:25,640 This piped to that, et cetera. 96 00:08:26,140 --> 00:08:27,840 And that's what Dataflow is. 97 00:08:28,540 --> 00:08:31,680 So it's a higher level, even above Stream. 98 00:08:32,300 --> 00:08:32,580 Okay. 99 00:08:33,060 --> 00:08:38,600 So basically, I mean, it's a collection of things basically to kind of, I don't know if automate is the right word, 100 00:08:38,680 --> 00:08:43,520 but to make it easier to solve some of these inherent issues you run into when you're building a distributed application, 101 00:08:43,700 --> 00:08:49,580 which is any sort of microservice or most cloud-based or cloud-native, quote-unquote, applications, right? 102 00:08:49,580 --> 00:08:57,680 And then the other bit that you mentioned is integration with cloud providers and infrastructure. 103 00:08:58,580 --> 00:09:04,360 So there are projects that are run by some of the top IaaS providers. 104 00:09:04,780 --> 00:09:12,560 So Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, et cetera, all have projects that are target Spring Cloud and allow. 105 00:09:13,180 --> 00:09:19,760 Some of them have implementations for Spring Cloud Stream, Discovery, Service Registration, 106 00:09:20,240 --> 00:09:24,660 or different circuit breakers and things like that that they implement, 107 00:09:24,920 --> 00:09:29,520 as well as Spring integration with their services, whatever those may be, you know, 108 00:09:29,820 --> 00:09:34,380 implementations of databases or messaging or whatever that is. 109 00:09:34,800 --> 00:09:35,020 All right. 110 00:09:35,560 --> 00:09:41,860 And this might be a very naive question, but if someone who is new to the Spring community 111 00:09:41,860 --> 00:09:47,760 and just getting started, like when I look at a Spring service, let's say around Dataflow or Streaming, 112 00:09:47,800 --> 00:09:55,440 how does that compare with, or how does Spring work with other services designed to do things like that, 113 00:09:55,480 --> 00:09:59,700 like a Kafka or a RabbitMQ or any of these other, let's say, streaming or... 114 00:09:59,700 --> 00:10:04,680 Well, that's usually the beauty of Spring as well, is that they typically have an abstraction 115 00:10:04,680 --> 00:10:09,340 and then implementations for various providers of that abstraction. 116 00:10:09,340 --> 00:10:14,480 So Stream has binders for both RabbitMQ and Kafka. 117 00:10:14,680 --> 00:10:17,260 And so your programming model doesn't change. 118 00:10:17,360 --> 00:10:22,800 In fact, Mark Heckler, who is one of our developer advocates, he does a talk about Stream. 119 00:10:23,540 --> 00:10:30,120 And in the middle of the talk, he switches one service from RabbitMQ to Kafka. 120 00:10:30,280 --> 00:10:35,680 It's listening to Rabbit and then outputting onto Kafka, for example, within a few seconds. 121 00:10:36,020 --> 00:10:44,700 So very nice abstractions so that your programming model doesn't change, even if the underlying system that you're using might. 122 00:10:45,200 --> 00:10:48,780 I tend to spend a lot of time looking at customer stories and whatnot. 123 00:10:49,160 --> 00:10:55,100 And a lot of times it's, we need to get something up and running ASAP or change something up ASAP. 124 00:10:55,300 --> 00:10:58,880 And Spring always seems to be the first order of business there, like in terms of, 125 00:10:59,420 --> 00:11:01,000 like, yeah, we just need to switch from one model to another. 126 00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:12,940 Well, you know, there was a huge investment in Java EE, but I think enterprises, so there are lots of competent developers out there that are comfortable in Java, 127 00:11:12,940 --> 00:11:14,920 that they're already using Spring. 128 00:11:15,060 --> 00:11:21,760 And as they move to something that benefits them, whether it's the ability to deploy more often, 129 00:11:21,760 --> 00:11:28,980 to have automated pipelines to test things, you know, whatever the case, microservices they want the teams to deploy independently, 130 00:11:29,100 --> 00:11:34,040 whatever the reason there is for changing their organization and changing their architecture, 131 00:11:34,940 --> 00:11:41,600 Spring and Spring Boot and Spring Cloud allow them to kind of have that warm, fuzzy, 132 00:11:42,640 --> 00:11:44,780 that they're still competent in all these things. 133 00:11:44,780 --> 00:11:49,420 Because now we just have a different model of deploying and consuming services. 134 00:11:50,220 --> 00:11:52,100 So I think that's really, really beneficial. 135 00:11:52,300 --> 00:11:57,820 And if they want to get into alternative languages, even like that feel, 136 00:12:00,280 --> 00:12:06,240 Java sometimes gets a bad rap as a language, which it's evolving and that's very, very good. 137 00:12:06,360 --> 00:12:15,600 But with first-class support for Kotlin, for example, you can get that modern language feel and everything is supported still. 138 00:12:15,600 --> 00:12:16,120 All right. 139 00:12:16,600 --> 00:12:19,400 I see this debate pop up every now and then. 140 00:12:19,540 --> 00:12:24,580 I say this specifically because there's a service, Spring Cloud, Netflix, which like you mentioned, Circuit Breakers, 141 00:12:24,600 --> 00:12:30,720 and it brings in a lot of these sorts of features that Netflix helped to popularize and then open source eventually. 142 00:12:30,980 --> 00:12:34,960 And this debate is like, well, most enterprise developers don't need to be Netflix engineers. 143 00:12:35,340 --> 00:12:39,360 So the logic being ergo, why do they care about any of these things? 144 00:12:39,440 --> 00:12:44,400 But on the other hand, like these are valuable patterns and valuable things. 145 00:12:44,400 --> 00:12:47,040 My argument is you probably should care about these things. 146 00:12:47,140 --> 00:12:51,420 Whether you need to do them on Netflix scale is another story, but like they're valuable. 147 00:12:51,920 --> 00:12:52,140 Yes. 148 00:12:52,380 --> 00:13:04,720 Like the scale of whether it's Netflix or Facebook or Google or whatever, Twitter, whatever internet darling you're looking at, 149 00:13:04,820 --> 00:13:06,360 not everyone deals with that. 150 00:13:06,440 --> 00:13:08,980 There are certainly enterprises that do. 151 00:13:08,980 --> 00:13:17,680 I mean, whether that's financial institutions or big box stores or whatever, that they do need that scale. 152 00:13:17,860 --> 00:13:19,040 But not everyone does. 153 00:13:20,160 --> 00:13:29,800 But if they have independent teams and want to deploy independently, they change architectures, microservices. 154 00:13:29,960 --> 00:13:32,060 They might not have hundreds of instances. 155 00:13:32,060 --> 00:13:34,120 They might have 10. 156 00:13:34,120 --> 00:13:37,120 But the problems are still there. 157 00:13:37,120 --> 00:13:38,720 You may as well. 158 00:13:39,220 --> 00:13:45,380 Like one thing that Josh Long says, it's like you're pair programming with the spring team. 159 00:13:45,640 --> 00:13:47,980 You don't have to come up with this all on your own. 160 00:13:48,120 --> 00:14:06,380 There's lots of experience going into not only the downstream libraries from companies like Netflix or HashiCorp or Microsoft or Google or whoever, as well as the spring team in integrating those and doing it in a way that's easy to consume and hopefully easier for developers to understand. 161 00:14:06,460 --> 00:14:19,220 Yeah, I think the idea, too, if you can do this with a line of code or a flag or something, it's worth it, especially as you were dealing with a distributed application where stuff could go wrong. 162 00:14:19,860 --> 00:14:31,160 And I think that's the thing, too, that gets missed out on, is something like a lot of what spring does is it's basically very simple commands to get this stuff integrated and functioning within your application, correct? 163 00:14:32,600 --> 00:14:41,720 Yeah, so you go to somewhere like a spring initializer, start.spring.io, and you choose the pieces you want. 164 00:14:41,800 --> 00:14:46,940 It automatically creates a skeleton project for you, and you can get up and running pretty quickly. 165 00:14:47,440 --> 00:14:53,420 For a long time, we were asking, well, okay, cloud computing is a thing, but everyone's just running the same types of applications. 166 00:14:53,520 --> 00:14:54,720 When is this going to start to change? 167 00:14:55,140 --> 00:14:58,960 And I think the answer is now and probably over the last several years. 168 00:14:58,960 --> 00:15:06,920 But still, for a lot of people, it needs to be easier than this big engineering project where you need to build stuff from scratch and DIY everything. 169 00:15:07,040 --> 00:15:10,700 The easier you can make it to run, I guess we would call cloud-native applications, the better. 170 00:15:11,100 --> 00:15:16,340 I think there's always a, do you need microservices? 171 00:15:16,700 --> 00:15:18,420 Will a monolith work for you? 172 00:15:18,540 --> 00:15:20,460 And I think the answer is yes. 173 00:15:20,500 --> 00:15:23,680 For certain situations, those are just fine. 174 00:15:23,680 --> 00:15:32,100 I mean, the principles in how you organize your monolith and how you organize your microservices are still similar. 175 00:15:32,460 --> 00:15:43,500 You want a well-organized monolith, even if you're not doing microservices, for example, and don't need some of the things that Spring Cloud provides because you just have a single application that you're running. 176 00:15:43,820 --> 00:15:54,820 And then finally, Spencer, I want to ask, so much naturally of the Spring conversation focuses on developers and why developers should care about a new Spring. 177 00:15:55,160 --> 00:15:58,000 Is there a rationale for executives or maybe up to the CIO? 178 00:15:58,220 --> 00:16:02,040 Why should they care about a development framework like Spring? 179 00:16:02,100 --> 00:16:12,020 I'd like to hear from you where it ties into bigger picture items, whether that's modernization broadly or digital transformation or whatever these terms that folks care about are. 180 00:16:13,440 --> 00:16:13,920 Sure. 181 00:16:13,920 --> 00:16:26,080 I'll start with a tweet that I saw recently, and it was someone complaining about the power of the laptops that some enterprises are buying for their developers. 182 00:16:27,200 --> 00:16:41,500 And through that conversation, someone had done a blog post a number of years ago that moving from a spinning hard drive to a solid state drive, 183 00:16:42,060 --> 00:16:49,480 the cost of the drive versus the time saved was in a few days, the drive paid for itself. 184 00:16:50,160 --> 00:16:56,940 And just from a productivity standpoint, I see similar things with Spring. 185 00:16:57,080 --> 00:17:00,920 Spring and Spring experience is a thing in the industry. 186 00:17:01,120 --> 00:17:04,620 You can hire someone with experience using Spring Boot. 187 00:17:04,620 --> 00:17:18,600 And that's one of the reasons, actually, that Netflix is standardizing on boot as opposed to some of the custom stuff they did before because they can hire people with the experience already. 188 00:17:19,100 --> 00:17:23,560 If they want to do training, we can come in and train them, things like that. 189 00:17:23,560 --> 00:17:38,420 And then, and even more recently is the Pivotal Spring runtime, the commercial support for the Spring stack standalone on wherever you're deploying, as well as the JVM that goes along with it. 190 00:17:38,480 --> 00:17:42,480 So you get supported JVM and supported Spring projects. 191 00:17:42,480 --> 00:17:52,360 So I think you have this spectrum of things from developer productivity to training to commercial support that I think are all well worth it. 192 00:17:52,920 --> 00:17:55,220 Well, listen, we are out of time, Spencer. 193 00:17:55,360 --> 00:17:56,080 Thank you so much. 194 00:17:56,420 --> 00:17:57,200 Thank you for having me. 195 00:17:57,420 --> 00:17:58,460 And thanks, everyone, for listening. 196 00:17:58,860 --> 00:18:00,100 There you have it, folks. 197 00:18:00,560 --> 00:18:08,700 If you're writing Java apps and not using Spring or using Spring and not taking full advantage of it, I hope you learned something here that will convince you to give it a try. 198 00:18:09,260 --> 00:18:12,160 And for more information, you can always visit spring.io. 199 00:18:12,160 --> 00:18:24,560 For more episodes of this podcast, as well as blog posts and guides to help you navigate the landscape of digital transformation and its underlying technologies, visit pivotal.io slash intersect. 200 00:18:24,860 --> 00:18:26,880 That is it until the next episode. 201 00:18:27,420 --> 00:18:28,420 Thank you.