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Microservices is a style of architecture consisting of a small, individual application component with a single responsibility, with a high degree of autonomy in terms of deployment and scalability. These components communicate via a lightweight protocol like REST over HTTP. In consequence, development teams are small (the two-pizza rule), focused on a microservice. In practice the team owns the entire lifecycle from development to deployment — if you built it, you run it. This creates a problem. After all, dev teams’ core competency is usually Maven, a microservices framework, say, Spring Boot, test frameworks like JUnit, and so on. But if we look at the steps involved in deploying a microservice:

• Package the application in a container like Docker. This involves writing a Dockerfile.
• Deploy the container to an orchestrator like Kubernetes. This involves writing several resources; description files for services, deployment, etc.

To use a term familiar to developers, this is an ‘impedance mismatch.’ To solve this problem, we need a class of tools that speak the language of developers and make the entire deployment steps transparent to them. The most famous of these is Jib, which we dealt with in a previous paper, which builds optimized Docker and OCI images for your Java applications and is available as a Maven plugin. There are other tools in this category like Dekorate which allows us to generate Kubernetes manifests using just Maven and Java annotations. The latest and comprehensive entry in this category is JKube from RedHat which our subject de jour.

Source: DZone