Getting Started

Motivation

• This repository was created to perform a test comparing the startup time between a standard spring boot microservice project, and a microservice project using Spring Native (https://docs.spring.io/spring-native/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/).

Stack

• Gradle 7.0.2
• jdk 21.1.0.r11-grl (OpenJDK Runtime Environment GraalVM CE 21.1.0 (build 11.0.11+8-jvmci-21.1-b05))
• spring-boot-starter-webflux
• spring-native

Project organization

Two sub-projects were created to separate the logic:

1. spring-native-microservice sub-project:
   Microservice project contains the Spring-Native setup to run this application on a GraalVM Native Image through Docker container
2. standard-microservice sub-project:
   Simple microservice project using spring-boot-starter-webflux

Both projects contain only one controller class with the same content just to test purpose:

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/user")
public class UserController {

    @GetMapping("/getName")
    public Mono<String> getName() {
        return Mono.just("Ragnar Lothbrok (Vikings)");
    }
}

How-to Run

There is a README.md file inside each sub-projects describing how to run them.

Test

It was pretty straightforward. To perform the startup time test, I ran both subprojects as described in the README.md file, and the results were amazing. Take a look below :)

Results

standard-microservice

• Build time: ~7 seconds
• Start time: ~3 seconds (too much time)
  

spring-native-microservice

• The $ gradle bootBuildImage command takes ~10 minutes to build a new Docker image
  

• And the startup time was unbelievable 0.171 seconds \o/
  

Final comment

• The startup time of the microservice project using Spring Native running on Native Image was ~17x faster than a standard microservice project running on HotSpot JVM.

My thoughts

The Spring team is doing a great job related to Spring Native.

This plugin came to compete with Micronaut and Quarkus, but I believe that the Spring team has a lot of work to do to release a version more trustful. I say that because in this simple POC, I faced many warnings and errors during the docker image build (maybe I forgot to set up something).

Anyways, congratulations Spring team!!!!! I'm impressed with the results and looking forward to testing new releases. \o/