M04 Q01 What is Spring Boot?

Spring Boot is a Java Framework that allows you to easily create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Java Applications. It is often used in Microservice Architecture because of simplicity that it allows.

Applications created with Spring Boot can be executed with simple java –jar command and also allows traditional war deployment. Spring Boot supports following embedded containers:

Tomcat
Jetty
Undertow

Simplicity of deployment and execution has many advantages, for example, it allows for Dev/Prod parity (https://12factor.net/) which increases product quality.

Spring Boot provides number of features that can be used to fulfill non-functional requirements for the project (externalized configuration, security, metrics, health checks).

Spring Boot provides many modules under common umbrella:

Spring Boot DevTools – live-reload to speed-up development
Spring Boot Actuator – monitoring and management of application
Spring Boot Starters – dependency set for technologies to minimize setup time
Spring Boot Autoconfiguration – configuration templates for technologies to minimize setup time

On top of it, you can use all Spring Framework technologies, like:

Spring Web – Spring MVC Framework
Template Engines – server side rendering engines for web pages
Spring Security – authentication and authorization framework
Spring Data MongoDB – NoSQL database client
... and many more