Category Archives: Spring

Vault for storing secrets (plus Spring Boot & Mongodb)

So this is a mix of a couple of howtos. First, we have a simple Spring Boot app that retrieves some data from a MongoDB database that has authentication enabled to access it. Next, we will see how to store secrets in a Vault implementation and then programmatically access it (in our case the user ID and password to access the database).

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Using Spring Boot to invoke ChatGPT/OpenAI API

OpenAI provides us the ability to invoke its features via RESTful APIs. This blog shows how to invoke the API using Spring Boot. There is nothing special here and no OpenAI Java libraries that I use. One can do the same in standard Java (non-spring) or even in more concise code with Nodejs. But here goes a sample with Spring Boot.

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AWS Beanstalk (running Spring Boot jar) and Log aggregation with ElasticSearch & Filebeat

Most serious applications (and distributed microservices style architectures) will require to provide a log aggregation & analysis feature to its dev & operations teams. Reviewing log entires from 10s or 100s of server instances is not something to take lightly. Whether you choose to use a commercial product or an open source offering – that does not matter; just make sure you have one available.

Recently I have been deploying applications using AWS Beanstalk. You can definitely configure CloudWatch Logs to send log streams over to AWS ElasticSearch service. Log messages can be routed to a Lambda function which would break the log messages into individual attributes suitable for indexing. I wanted to try a slightly different route where I depend less on CloudWatch Logs and more on open source tools. Enter filebeat on Beanstalk.

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Serverless Architecture Style

To discuss Serverless Architecture we need to understand how we got here. From using physical machines we moved to virtual machines (somewhere in between a few brave folks also used linux/solaris containers). The current trend is container technologies such as Docker or CoreOS RKT which allow even more efficient use of resources. Regardless of which you use, we are often required to plan our application infrastructure needs upfront and permanently keep the “servers” running.

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Asynchronous Indexing into ElasticSearch using Spring Integration & ActiveMQ

Here is a slightly modified Architecture on my previous post on Getting Started With ElasticSearch. If you find yourself indexing content constantly (like 100s or even 1000s per minute) you might want to consider an asynchronous architecture towards indexing.

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