Java, Spring Boot and AWS' Elastic Beanstalk
One of the biggest problems with the development and deployment of server-side applications in Java is figuring out how and where to host them.
HTML and JavaScript applications written in React or Angular can be easily deployed into free or low-cost hosting platforms such as GitHub Pages or Amazon S3. Full deployment is just a matter of copying files to the server.
That's not the case with server-side Java and Spring Boot applications. Java apps need more than an internet-attached file server to work. They require a full Java runtime to function, and provisioning that is a moderately involved process.
Spring Boot deployment with Beanstalk
However, there is a fairly simple and somewhat compelling option if you're working with AWS. Use Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk as your Java or Spring Boot hosting environment.
Amazon Beanstalk makes it incredibly easy to deploy RESTful APIs written in Jakarta EE, or HTML-based applications written in Spring Web. Those steps are as follows:
- Build and test your Java or Spring Boot application as you normally would.
- Configure your application.properties file so your app runs on port 5000.
- Use Maven or Gradle to package your application as a JAR or WAR file.
- Create a Beanstalk environment and deploy your application.
Java, Spring and the AWS Cloud
In less than five minutes you can have a server-side, Java- or Spring Boot-based application deployed and hosted in the cloud.
Furthermore, autoscaling and load-balancing are all taken care of by the Beanstalk environment, so pointing a domain name at your instance is as simple as pointing a Route 53 domain name at the Beanstalk instance. There's no need to configure load balancers or elastic IPs.
Enterprise deployments with containers, using the Elastic Container Service or spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, are all the rage these days. Sometimes, though, there's value in keeping it simple. If you want a simple deployment of Spring Boot and Java apps, AWS Beanstalk is one of the simplest ways to go.
Cameron McKenzie has been a Java EE software engineer for 20 years. His current specialties include Agile development; DevOps; Spring; and container-based technologies such as Docker, Swarm and Kubernetes.