Examine the application components based on the GitHub repository information

Your first step is to familiarize yourself with the existing Spring Petclinic workload, its components, and the GitHub repository where its source code is located.

Step-by-step guidance

To start, you’ll learn about the Spring Petclinic workload.

  1. On your lab computer, open a web browser, go to GitHub, and sign in to your GitHub account. If you don’t have a GitHub account, create one (go to Join GitHub, and follow the instructions at Signing up for a new GitHub account).
  2. Go to the source folder of this lab’s GitHub repo, and review the README.md file.

  3. Review the instructions for manually running the application in your dev environment. Pay particular attention to the readme sections that cover starting services locally without Docker, starting services locally with docker-compose, and starting services locally with docker-compose and Java.

    At this point, you do not need to run the app in your dev environment using these methods. Simply reviewing and understanding how you can use these instructions is sufficient for now. However, if you’ve got extra time after completing the rest of this lab, feel free to try launching the application and exploring its functionality locally.

  4. In the source folder of this lab’s GitHub repo, go to each folder that contains the code of the individual spring-petclinic-* services and spend a few minutes reviewing the contents, familiarizing yourself with the overall code structure.

microservices overview

Important components to review include:

  • Spring Boot applications, such as the customers, vets, and visits apps.
  • The API gateway application used to route external requests to the various internal component applications.
  • Spring Boot components, such as a Eureka service application (providing discovery capabilities across the workload), a Spring Cloud Config Server, and a Spring Boot Admin Server.
  • The external GitHub repo and database.

Explore the repository until you’re familiar with how the app works. You don’t need to understand all the details, but you should know the basic app structure and should have a high-level overview of the various components and what they do.

After you’ve reviewed the GitHub repository, you can move to the next steps in planning your deployment.