I have an update on my slowdown issues on Sierra. It appears the real problem lies in the AWS Java SDK. After talking to the spring boot people via github they were able to narrow it down to an Amazon issue. I opened an issue on github with Amazon and they responded that the version of the SDK that ships in the current spring cloud has this issue in it, and it has been fixed in a newer version of the SDK. One of the big value propositions of Spring Boot to me and the release train concept of Spring Cloud or Spring Data is that it is a collection of dependencies that have all been tested together, which lowers my risk of using them together. So I opened a request with Spring Cloud AWS to upgrade their SDK. Unfortunately they don’t seem very timely in responding to issues as I notice it looks like there are no responses on any of the issues raised in the last 2 weeks.

In the meantime I have a work around that doesn’t involve having to manually bump up your AWS SDK version and that is to set the following property in your application.properties file of your Spring Boot App:

cloud.aws.credentials.instanceProfile=false

Obviously setting this flag for your app running on AWS that uses the IAM profiles isn’t good, but it is a good local workaround on your development machine until the SDK gets updated in Spring Cloud.