Spring Boot Security module best practice

Spring Boot Security is a module of the Spring Framework that provides a set of features for securing Spring-based applications. It is built on top of Spring Security, which is a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework. 

Spring Boot Security provides several features out of the box, including: 

Authentication: Spring Boot Security supports several authentication mechanisms, including basic authentication, token-based authentication (JWT), and OAuth2/OpenID Connect. 

Authorization: Spring Boot Security supports role-based access control (RBAC) and can be configured to check for specific roles or permissions before allowing access to an endpoint. 

CSRF protection: Spring Boot Security provides built-in protection against cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. 

Encryption: Spring Boot Security supports HTTPS and can be configured to encrypt all traffic to and from the application. 

Security Configuration: Spring Boot Security allows to secure the application by providing a set of security configuration properties that can be easily integrated into different security scenarios. 

It also provides support for the integration of Spring Security with other Spring modules such as Spring MVC, Spring Data, and Spring Cloud.

Securing a Spring Boot API is important for several reasons: 

• Confidentiality: By securing an API, you can prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and protect against data breaches. 
• Integrity: Securing an API can prevent unauthorized changes to data and ensure that data is not tampered with in transit. 
• Authentication: By securing an API, you can ensure that only authorized users can access the API and perform specific actions. 
• Authorization: Securing an API can also ensure that users can only access the resources and perform the actions that they are authorized to do. 
• Compliance: Many industries and governments have regulations that mandate certain security measures for handling sensitive data. Failing to secure an API can result in non-compliance and penalties. 
• Reputation: Security breaches can lead to loss of trust and damage to an organization's reputation. 
• Business continuity: Security breaches can lead to loss of revenue, legal action, and other negative consequences. Securing an API can help to minimize the risk of a security breach and ensure business continuity.

There are several ways to secure a Spring Boot API, including: 

• Basic authentication: This method involves sending a username and password with each request to the API. Spring Security can be used to implement basic authentication. 
• Token-based authentication: This method involves sending a token with each request to the API. The token can be generated by the server and passed to the client, or the client can obtain the token from a third-party service. JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are a popular choice for token-based authentication in Spring Boot. 
• OAuth2 and OpenID Connect: These are industry-standard protocols for authentication and authorization. Spring Security can be used to implement OAuth2 and OpenID Connect. 
• HTTPS: All data sent to and from the API should be encrypted using HTTPS to protect against eavesdropping. Input validation: 
• Input validation should be used to prevent malicious data from being passed to the API. Spring Boot provides built-in support for input validation. 
• Regularly monitoring and maintaining the security of the application and its dependencies It's important to note that the best approach will depend on the requirements of your specific application and the level of security that is needed.

Token-based authentication is one of the most commonly used methods to secure Spring Boot API. The reason token-based authentication is so popular is that it provides several advantages over other authentication methods: 

• Stateless: Tokens are self-contained and do not require the server to maintain a session, which makes it easy to scale the API horizontally. 
• Decoupled: Tokens are decoupled from the API, which means that the API does not need to know anything about the user. This makes it easy to add or remove authentication providers without affecting the API. 
• Portable: Tokens can be passed between different systems, which makes it easy to authenticate users across different platforms. 
• JSON Web Tokens (JWT) which is a widely used token format, is an open standard and can be easily integrated into different systems. 
• It can also be used in combination with OAuth2 and OpenID Connect. 

It's important to note that token-based authentication is not suitable for all use cases, but it is widely used and can be a good choice for many Spring Boot API.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!

What is Spring Batch and Partitioning ?

Spring Batch is a framework for batch processing in Spring. It provides a set of reusable functions for processing large volumes of data, such as reading and writing data from/to files or databases, and performing complex calculations and transformations on the data. 

Spring Batch provides several key features, including: 

• Chunk-oriented processing: Spring Batch processes data in small chunks, which allows for efficient memory usage and the ability to process large volumes of data. 
• Transactions: Spring Batch supports the use of transactions, which ensures that data is processed consistently and that any errors can be rolled back. 
• Job and step abstractions: Spring Batch uses the concepts of jobs and steps to organize the batch processing logic. A job is a high-level abstraction that represents a complete batch process, while a step is a more specific task that is part of a job. 
• Retry and skippable exception handling: Spring Batch provides built-in retry and skippable exception handling, which makes it easy to handle errors and recover from failures during batch processing. 
• Parallel processing: Spring Batch allows for parallel processing of steps, which can improve the performance of batch processing. 
• Job scheduling: Spring Batch provides built-in support for scheduling jobs using either a Cron-like expression or a fixed delay. 
• Extensibility: Spring Batch allows for custom code to be added to the framework by providing a set of callbacks and interfaces that can be implemented to perform custom logic. 
• Spring Batch is typically used in situations where data needs to be processed in large volumes, where performance is critical, and where the data needs to be processed in a consistent and repeatable manner.

Example of how to implement a Spring Batch job using a Spring Boot application:

• First, add the Spring Batch and Spring Boot Starter dependencies to your pom.xml file:

• Create a Spring Batch Job configuration class, where you define the steps that make up the job and how they are related:
  
  
  
• Create a Spring Boot main class, where you can run the job using the Spring Batch JobLauncher:
  
  
  

Spring Partitioning is a feature of Spring Batch that allows for the processing of large amounts of data to be divided into smaller, manageable chunks, and then processed in parallel. This can improve the performance of batch processing by allowing multiple processors or machines to work on different parts of the data at the same time. 

Spring Partitioning works by dividing the data into partitions, which are processed by different worker threads. Each partition is processed independently and the results are later combined. 

Spring Partitioning provides several key features, including: 

• Data partitioning: Spring Partitioning allows for the data to be divided into smaller, manageable chunks, which can then be processed in parallel. 
• Parallel processing: Spring Partitioning allows for the parallel processing of partitions, which can improve the performance of batch processing. 
• Scalability: Spring Partitioning allows for batch processing to be scaled out by adding more worker threads or machines. 
• Flexibility: Spring Partitioning allows for different partitioning strategies to be used depending on the specific requirements of the data and the batch process. 
• Integration with Spring Batch: Spring Partitioning is integrated with Spring Batch and can be used with the Job and Step abstractions provided by Spring Batch. 

Sample code that demonstrates how to implement Spring Partitioning in a Spring Batch application:

• First, create a Job and a Step that uses the partitioning feature:
  
  
  
• Next, create a `Partitioner` class that will be responsible for dividing the data into partitions. This class should implement the `org.springframework.batch.core.partition.support.Partitioner` interface:

  

  
  
• Finally, create an ItemReader, ItemProcessor, and ItemWriter that will be used by each partition:

  

  
  

Spring Partitioning is useful in situations where a large amount of data needs to be processed in a short period of time, and where the batch process can be parallelized to improve performance. It's important to note that not all scenarios can be parallelized, and a proper analysis of the data and process needs to be done before deciding to use partitioning.

Happy Coding and keep Sharing!!

Microservice Architecture in Java

Microservice Architecture enables large teams to build scalable applications that are composed of multiple small loosely coupled services. In Microservice each service handles a dedicated function inside a large-scale application.

Challenges that we all see when designing Microservice Architecture are "Right-Sizing and Identifying the limitations and Boundaries of the Services".

Some of the most commonly used approaches in the industry:-

• Domain Driven:- In this approach, we would need good Domain Knowledge and it takes a lot of time to close alignment with all the Business stakeholders to identify the need and requirements to develop Microservices for business capabilities.  
• Event Storming Sizing:-  We conduct a session with all business Stakeholders and identify various events in the system and based on that we can group them in Domain Driven.

In the below Microservice Architecture for a Bank, where we have (Loan, Card, Account, and Customer) Microservices, along with other required services for the successful implementation of Microservice Architecture. 

Let's look at the most critical components that are required for Microservice Architecture Implementation. 

The API Gateway handles all incoming requests and routes to the relevant microservices.  The API gateway depends on the Identity Provider service to handle the authentication.

To locate the service to route an incoming request to, API Gateway consults a service registry and discovery service. ALL Microservice register with Service Registry and Discover the location of other Microservices using Discovery services. 

Let's take a look at the components in detail for a Successful Microservice Architecture and why they are required.

1. Handle Routing Requirements API Gateway:- Spring Cloud Gateway is a library for building an API gateway. Spring cloud gateway sits between a requester and a resource, where it intercepts analysis of the request.  It is also a preferred API gateway from the spring cloud team.  It also has the following advantages:- 
1. Built on Spring 5, reactor, and Spring WebFlux.
2. It also includes circuit breaking and discovery service with Eureka.  
2. Configuration Service:-  We can't Hard code the config details inside the service and in a DTAP it would be a nightmare to manage all config in the application properties plus manage them when a new service joins. So for that In a Microservice architecture, we have a config service that then can load and inject the configuration from (Git Repo, File system, or Database) to Microsrevies while they're starting up, and since we are talking about Java, I have used Spring Cloud Config for Configuration Management.
3. Service Registry and Discovery:- In a Microservice Arihcture how do services locate each other inside a network and how do we tell our application architecture when a new service is onboarded or a new node is added for existing services and how load balancer will work. This all looks very complicated but, We have Spring Cloud Discovery Service using the Eureka agent. Some Advantages of using Service discovery. 
1. No Limitation on Availability 
2. Peer to Peer communication between service Discovery agent
3. Dynamically Managed IPs, Configurations, and Load Balance.
4. Fault-tolerance and Resilience 
4. Resilience Inside Microservices:- In this, We make sure that we handle the service failure gracefully, avoid cascading effects if one of the services is failed, and have self-healing capabilities. For Resilience Spring Framework Support Resilience4J  which is a lightweight and easy-to-use fault tolerance library inspired by NetFlix Hystrix. Before Resilience4J NetFlix Hystrix.is most commonly used for resiliency but it is now in maintenance mode.  Resilience4J offers the following patterns for increasing fault tolerance. 
1. Circuit Breaking:- Used to stop making a request when a service is failing.
2. Fallback:- Alternative path to failing service.
3. Retry:- Retry when a service is failing temporarily failed.
4. Rate Limit:- Limit the number of calls a service gets at a time.
5. Bulkhead:- To avoid overloading.
5. Distributed Tracing and logging:- For debugging the problem in a microservice architecture we would need to aggregate all the logs traces and monitor the chain of service calls for that we have Spring Cloud Sleuth and Zipkin.
1. Sleuth provides auto-configuration for disturbing logs it also adds the SPAN ID to all the logs by filtering and interacting with other spring components and generating the Correlation Id passes through to all the system calls.
2. Zipkin:- Is used for Data-Visualisations 
6.  Monitoring:- Is used to monitor service metrics health checks and create alerts based on Monitoring and we have different approaches to do that. Let's see the most commonly used approaches.
1.  Actuator:- is mainly used to expose operational information like health, dump, info, and memory.
2. Micrometer:- Expose Actuator data in a format that can be understood by the Monitoring system all we need to add vendor-specific Micrometer dependency in the service.
3. Prometheus:- It is a time-series database to store metric data and also has the data-visualization capability.
4. Grafana:-  Pulled the data from various data sources like Prometheus and offers rich UI to create custom Dashboard and also allows to set rule-based alerts and notifications. 

We have covered all the relevant components for a successful Microservice Architecture, I build  Microservices using  Spring Framework and all the above Components Code Repo. 

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!

 

Deploy Spring Boot API Docker Image to GCP Kubernetes Engine

In the previous blog, we build a demo Spring Boot API and deployed it to Docker Hub using GitHub Actions. In this blog, we will deploy that same docker image to Kubernetes.  A quick recap [read].

In order to deploy the docker image to Google Cloud, we need a Google Cloud Account signup for Free Trail, If you don't have a Google Cloud account already it will first show you the billing page. after that, it will redirect you to the landing page. Here we first need to create a project, because in GC everything we do, we do it in a project, and billing is also generated based on that.

Here you can see all the billing-related information based on your use, after that, we need to go to the services section and click on the left burger menu and select Kubernetes Engine - > Cluster.

Here we first need to create a Cluster because then only we would be able to deploy anything. I have selected the Self-Managed Cluster option,  you can select the same or the recommended one which is then managed by Google.

Here we need to enter the Cluster name followed by the Location Type and the rest of the settings we can leave as default, click on Create button which will start the process of creating a cluster and it will 1-2 mins.

So, the Cluster is created successfully with 12GB of Total Memory, and 6 CPUs which should be sufficient for our demo application to run.

The next step is we need to create our deployment file.

 apiVersion: apps/v1  
 kind: Deployment  
 metadata:  
  name: spring-docker-k8s-deployment  
 spec:  
  replicas: 2  
  selector:  
   matchLabels:  
    app: spring-docker-k8s  
  template:  
   metadata:  
    labels:  
     app: spring-docker-k8s  
   spec:  
    containers:  
     - name: spring-docker-k8s  
      image: hemkant/github-actions  
      ports:  
       - containerPort: 5678  

In this deployment file, I am using the same docker image which we deployed to the docker hub, with just one replica.

Next, we need to execute this deployment file and for that, we can use Google Cloud shell. 

 

Go to Cluster and click on three dots and Connect, this will open the shell prompt in the browser for us to run kubectl commands, after that we need to run the command to authenticate with GC.

After that, we should be able to upload the deployment file which we created.

Once your file is uploaded you can run ls command to check, and you should see the file in the directory.

Next, we need to run "kubectl apply -f <filename.yaml>"

This command will create the Pods inside the cluster which we created, from the menu go to Workloads.

Here we can see the deployment is done and the status is ok with 2/2 Pods. Next, we need to expose the traffic on a specific port which is 8080 for our application.

After a couple of mins, you can go to the Service & Ingress menu to get the external endpoint to access this application from the public domain. 

That's it we have successfully deployed our Spring Boot API docker image to Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine. Deployment YAML

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!

SpringBoot API with GitHub Actions, Docker Deployment

Today, We are going to explore and see other possibilities of the most important aspect of SDLC, Which is Continues Integration & Continues Deployment aka CI/CD. There are many tools (Jenkins, Bamboo, etc) available in the market which we can use to Build, Test and Deploy the changes on servers.

In the above diagram, the entire CI/CD is taken care of by Jenkins which is a 3rd party tool. In the real world, this required additional resources (infrastructure) and a team to manage this.

So, since We are using GitHub is there a way we can reduce this additional stuff. Yes, we can use GitHub Actions where the entire CI/CD will run on the same platform. We all have seen this option in GitHub but very rarely do we go there.

To understand it better, let's build a sample Spring Boot application --> Push the code in GitHub -->Trigger Github Actions --> Docker hub.

First, we need to create a repository in GitHub and then go to the Actions tab and click new Workflow options, here we will get many workflow options that we want to integrate with our application, but for this demo, we need to select " Java with Maven".

After you click on configure it will create a maven.yml file which you need to merge with your code, but before that, we need to update the yml to support our application build.

and yes that's it so whenever we merge the code in the master branch the GitHub Actions workflow will trigger and build the code, but we want is that after building the code the, latest changes should also deploy to the Container Registry I am using Docker here, but you can use any other.

In order to push the changes to the docker, we first need to create a repository in the docker hub and after that, we need to tell our maven.yml file about this new step.  

 # This workflow will build a Java project with Maven, and cache/restore any dependencies to improve the workflow execution time  
 # For more information see: https://help.github.com/actions/language-and-framework-guides/building-and-testing-java-with-maven  
 name: Java CI with Maven  
 on:  
  push:  
   branches: [ "master" ]  
  pull_request:  
   branches: [ "master" ]  
 jobs:  
  build:  
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest  
   steps:  
   - uses: actions/checkout@v3  
   - name: Set up JDK 17  
    uses: actions/setup-java@v3  
    with:  
     java-version: '17'  
     distribution: 'temurin'  
     cache: maven  
   - name: Build with Maven  
    run: mvn clean install  
   - name: Build & Push Docker Image  
    uses: mr-smithers-excellent/docker-build-push@v5  
    with:  
     image: hemkant/github-actions  
     tags: latest  
     registry: docker.io  
     dockerfile: Dockerfile  
     username: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_USERNAME}}  
     password: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_PASSWORD}}  

I have used another image here which will perform all the operations docker-build-push. after that, the credentials to access the docker hub is stored in GitHub secrets.

 

After all of these let's commit some code and see, how all these work together. In the below screenshot, we can see all the workflow triggers whenever I committed the code.

and let's also see if the steps we mentioned in our maven.yml file are followed or not, for that we can click on any item to check and it will show us all the details.

 And the docker file which I used here is 

 FROM openjdk:17  
 EXPOSE 8080  
 ADD target/github-actions.jar github-actions.jar  
 ENTRYPOINT ["java", "-jar", "/github-actions.jar"]  

let's check the Build & Push Docker Image step. looks like everything is fine here, and image is pushed to Docker Hub

The last thing we should also check is Docker Hub, looks good the image is pushed successfully.

 

We have covered all the points which we discussed at the beginning of this blog. Code Repo.

In the next blog, We will deploy the same image on the Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes. 

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!

Spring Boot API with MongoDB Atlas

In this blog, We are going to explore and learn the Spring Boot application with MongoDB Atlas. For that, we need to first need to create an account at https://cloud.mongodb.com, and configure some default settings in order to spin a new free cluster. We also get the option to select the cloud provider and region.

 

after creating the cluster and configuring credentials, we are all set as you can see I have created a new cluster in the AWS cloud, and the Collection is called "task" and it is a shared one so free no charges will apply. 

Next, let's initialize the Spring Boot application for that, we can go to https://start.spring.io/  or if you have a Spring Boot plugin in your IDE you can use that as well.

In the Spring initializer, I have added four dependencies. 

1. Spring Web:- For building RESTful APIs.
2. Spring Data MongoDB: -  It is a part of the Spring Data project, which provides integration with the MongoDB document database.
3. Spring Boot Actuator:- it is a sub-project of Spring Boot and is used for monitoring purposes.
4. Lombok:- For Java annotations. 

After this, We can generate the code and open it in your favorite IDE. I have written code for CRUD operations to test the API with MongoDB Atlas.

Let's see 1-2 examples.

• Create some content in MongoDB Atlast using Spring Boot API:
  
  
  
• Let's invoke the GET by ID endpoint
  
  
  
• GET ALL endpoint
  
  
  
• Rest of the operations you can check in the code but one more thing I wanted to show here is how the data is stored in the MongoDB Atlas, for that we can go to the cluster and click on Browse Collection 
  
  
  

There are other things that we can explore such as Realtime Monitoring, Enabling Data API which is available in MongoDB Atlas.

  

 That's it in this blog. Code Repo.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!