Stratospheric

In February 2023, we published another update to "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS".

This time it’s a pretty big one, as we’ve migrated the Stratospheric sample Todo application to Spring Boot 3.0 and Spring Cloud 3.0.

The release of Spring Boot 3.0 marks a new era of developing applications with the Spring Framework. 4.5 years after the release of Spring Boot 2.0, we’re now looking into a bright future and can make the most of Spring Framework 6, Java 17, and GraalVM.

You can read more about the new release in this blog post on the Stratospheric website: https://stratospheric.dev/blog/stratospheric-1.10-release/

In October 2022, we released version 1.9 of "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS".

With our current Stratospheric online course recording efforts, we added a ready-to-use blueprint for an operational Amazon CloudWatch dashboard for our Spring Boot application.

Furthermore, we fixed some inconsistencies in our manuscript.

Finally, as our complementary online course is making good progress, we now refer to it as part of the introduction and outro.

You can read more about the new release in this blog post on the Stratospheric website: https://stratospheric.dev/blog/stratospheric-1.9-release/

It’s been exactly one year since we have released version 1.0 of the Stratospheric book.

The book already has 900 readers on Leanpub. Let’s make it 1,000 this month!

We want to celebrate the anniversary with you by releasing version 1.8 of the book and doing an anniversary sale:

https://stratospheric.dev/blog/stratospheric-1.8-release/

What a ride! We're happy this effort now has come to fruition.

We've released version 1.0 of Stratospheric on August 1st, 2021.

Thanks to everyone who trusted in this project in its early stages!

Here are some key facts about this project and the application we built as part of the book:

• 445 pages eBook with practical hands-on advice for running production-ready Spring Boot applications on AWS
• three main modules: "Deploying with AWS", "Spring Boot & AWS", and "Production Readiness with AWS"
• 19 chapters with real-world examples and a complementary GitHub repository
• integrating core AWS services (SQS, SES, RDS, MQ, Lambda, etc.) with Spring Boot
• application runtime: AWS ECS Fargate cluster

Building a Continuous Deployment Pipeline: Software delivery performance is highly correlated with organizational performance, so we'll want to deploy often. That means we don't want to trigger a deployment manually but instead implement a continuous deployment pipeline that pushes each change into production as quickly as possible. In this chapter, we'll create self-serve workflows that we can use to spin up a whole new application environment as well as create a continuous deployment workflow.

Sharing Todos with AWS SQS and AWS SES: When using web applications, we often want to collaborate with others. The upcoming feature allows a Todo owner to share their task with other users of our Todo application. The invited person will receive an email to confirm the collaboration. Technically speaking, we'll leverage and integrate AWS SQS (Simple Queue Service) and AWS SES (Simple Email Service) for this feature.
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Push Notifications with Amazon MQ: Building upon the sharing feature from the chapter mentioned above, we'll explore how to notify others about changes. This is where push notifications come into play. In this chapter, we'll consider the benefits, ins-and-outs, and strategies of push notifications and the required AWS infrastructure for implementing those. We'll have a look at the publish-subscribe messaging pattern and how to implement it in the context of web applications by using the WebSocket protocol.

Designing a Deployment Project with CDK: Building upon our First Steps with CDK we'll go into much more detail about deploying AWS infrastructure with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) in this chapter. You'll learn how to create the entire infrastructure (network, database server, you name it) required for running a cloud-based web application.

Building User Registration and Login: Authentication & authorization and login & registration features are a requirement for almost every web application. Instead of reinventing this particular wheel, with AWS Cognito we'll draw upon an existing solution for implementing these features. We'll build our app's registration and login functionality on top of a Cognito User Pool and secure our application with Spring Security based on the industry standards OAuth 2.0 & OpenID Connect 1.0.

Connecting to a Database With RDS: Just like login & registration, most web applications require some sort of data storage for persisting data across sessions. In this chapter, you'll learn how to set up and use relational database management systems (RDBMS) - PostgreSQL, specifically - for storing data in the context of AWS. We'll cover the required IAM permissions, AWS infrastructure, and how to use our new database with Spring Boot, both in production and locally during development.

Managing Permissions with IAM - this chapter gives an overview of the concepts we can use with AWS in order to secure our resources and to authorize both individuals and applications to access them.
Local Development Setup - this chapter explains how we can develop our cloud-based Todo application on our local machines without additional AWS costs.

The Evolution of Automated Deployments - this chapter gives an overview of the most popular options to deploy an application to AWS - from manual deployments with the AWS Console to fully automated deployments with the Cloud Development Kit (CDK).

First Steps with CDK - this chapter gives an introduction to the AWS Cloud Development Kit. By using CDK we can replace the YAML-based CloudFormation setup with actual Java code and never worry about indentation again.

The first version contains the following chapters:

The first chapter describes the "The Sample Todo Application" we created as an example for introducing various AWS features, techniques, and best practices.

The second chapter is about "Getting Warm With AWS". After setting up to work with AWS, you'll deploy your first Spring Boot application. No previous AWS knowledge needed!

The third chapter will give you an "An Overview of AWS Services" we'll use for building and running our sample application. These include, among others: CloudFormation, Cognito, ECS, EC2, SES, SQS, and SNS.