From an empty project to a production Kubernetes deployment. No hand-waving.
Every Spring Boot tutorial on the internet shows you how to build a REST endpoint in twelve lines and then says "and from here, you can extend it!" — as if the remaining 95% of building a production service is a creative exercise best left to the reader's imagination. It isn't. It's error handling, security, observability, deployment pipelines, and the slow dawning realization that you've accidentally become a distributed systems engineer.
This 13-part series takes the other approach. I start with an empty project and build a real, production-grade microservice — one layer at a time. Each article focuses on one concern, so you can follow along in order or jump to the topic that's currently keeping you up at night.
The episodes
- 🏗️ The Blueprint Before the Build — layered architecture with SLICED, enforced by ArchUnit
- ⚙️ Spring Boot Alchemy — auto-configuration, profiles and property binding: PROPS
- 🌐 REST Assured — API design developers actually want to use: CLEAR
- 🗄️ The Data Foundation — JPA, Hibernate and Flyway migrations: FORGE
- 🛡️ When the World Breaks — circuit breakers, retries and rate limiting: SHIELD
- ⚡ Cache Me If You Can — smart caching with Caffeine: TEMPO
- 🔒 Guarding the Gates — Spring Security, RBAC and CORS: GUARD
- 💥 Fail Gracefully — sealed exceptions and RFC 7807 errors: CRAFT
- 🚀 10,000 Threads and a Dream — virtual threads and async composition: ASYNC
- 🔭 Can You See Me Now? — logs, metrics and distributed tracing: TRACE
- 🧪 Trust, But Verify — a testing strategy that creates confidence: PYRAMID
- 🐳 Ship It — Docker multi-stage builds and Compose: DOCK
- ☸️ To Production and Beyond — Kubernetes and Helm deployment: HELM
Every published part appears with its link in the list below — it updates automatically with every new part.
What to expect
Thirteen parts covering the full journey: layered architecture, dependency injection, REST API design, JPA and database migrations, error handling, caching strategies, Spring Security, input validation, virtual threads and concurrency, observability, testing strategy, Docker containerization, and Kubernetes deployment. No "it just works" magic. No diagrams that look impressive but explain nothing. Just the honest, occasionally painful process of building something that actually survives contact with production traffic.