It has been a crazy couple of months. Since I last posted I made a trip out to San Francisco to meet the rest of the team I work with (and had a great time). If you live in Texas there is no better time to visit San Francisco then at the end of July. It was a welcome break from the heat. I had a great time and realized when I was out there that I hadn’t been out there since 2005, so I was over due for a trip. I had forgotten how much I love that city it is a really fun place to hang out (though not a place I would really want to live).

We are also about to launch our second Spring Boot Microservice. This one I am really excited about it is even more ambitious than our first one and should provide huge value to the business. The interesting new technology we used in this one is Amazon’s SQS (Simple Queue Service). I am going to say off the bat that the documentation for Spring Cloud is kind of crap, so I spent a lot of time debugging the framework to figure out how to integrate this thing. But now that we have it working it seems to work great. It definitely is pretty light on features compared to something like RabbitMQ, but it seems to get the job done and the Spring Integration is great. I am hoping to put out a blog post on how to configure it as we got hung up a few places with it.

One of the nice things about going to SQS is it forced me to upgrade our Monolith to Spring 4.2 from 4.0 as the current Spring Cloud Brixton release train won’t run on Spring 4.0. I am hoping to roll out Java 8 there as well in the next couple of weeks so that we will be sitting on a fairly current framework on our oldest app and our Microservices running the latest and greatest of everything.

We already have 2 more microservices planned out, it is just a matter of figuring out how they will fit into the product roadmap. I think once we get that delivered we will have cut our monolith down quite a bit and I hope at that point it will be small enough for me to convert it over to boot and simplify it. As I see lot of opportunities to really get everything we are doing lean which should let us turn around features for the business even faster.

Anyway that is the latest update, hopefully I can carve out some time to work on a SQS configuration post. Until next time…