Build a Spring Cloud Microservice Platform with Docker: A Step‑by‑Step Guide

Spring Cloud is a suite of tools for building distributed systems on the JVM, offering solutions for configuration management, service discovery, circuit breaking, intelligent routing, distributed sessions, and more. It builds on the familiar Spring Framework and Spring Boot, simplifying the development of cloud‑native applications.

Configuration Management

Service Discovery

Circuit Breaker

Distributed Session

The platform relies on two essential microservices: a configuration service and a discovery service. The configuration service stores environment‑specific settings outside the application code, allowing services to retrieve configuration at runtime via simple HTTP calls. It can serve different Git repositories per environment, enabling version‑controlled, centralized configuration without restarting services.

The discovery service maintains a registry of service instances. Clients use Spring Cloud Feign (derived from Netflix OSS) to call other services by logical service ID; the actual URL is resolved automatically at runtime via the discovery registry (Eureka or Consul).

An API gateway sits in front of the microservices, exposing a unified entry point. It discovers services through the discovery registry and creates proxy routes so that external callers can access the movie and recommendation services via consistent paths.

The example project demonstrates these concepts end‑to‑end. It includes Docker‑based microservices for movies, recommendations, a configuration service, two discovery services (Eureka and Consul), and an API gateway. Persistence is mixed: Neo4j for graph data, MongoDB for document storage, and MySQL for relational data.

To run the demo, ensure the following prerequisites are installed:

Maven 3

Java 8

Docker

Docker Compose

Clone the repository:

https://github.com/kbastani/spring-cloud-microservice-example

From the project root, execute: mvn clean install This builds all services, creates Docker images, and pushes them to the local Docker daemon. Then start the cluster with Docker Compose: docker-compose up When the containers are up, the Eureka dashboard shows registered services. Access the API gateway to reach the movie service, which exposes HATEOAS‑enabled REST endpoints.

Key takeaways from the tutorial include service discovery, centralized configuration, API gateway routing, and Docker‑Compose orchestration for a cloud‑native microservice architecture.