Microservices framework-Spring Cloud vs Oracle Helidon
Published in
2 min readJan 29, 2020
- Spring Cloud is simply set of modules build on top of Spring frameowk to build full stack Microservices. It has many-many modules and it keep increasing due to Spring dependency injection. Many modules are just like an adapter to integrate with tools like Consul, Prometheus, Jaeger, Kafka. whereas Helidon has two variant Helidon SE, a lightweight Microservices framework and Helidon MP build on top of Eclipse MicroProfile. Helidon also has many modules but more focused on building API.
- Data Management :- When it comes to maintaining data consistency in multi services environment both framework does not have inbuilt modules. Though we can use 2PC, 3PC protocols with the help of other open source projects. Both framework lack the CQRS and Event-Sourcing patterns implementation. For example Axon framework has native CQRS and Event-Driven pattern support. we can use Axon with Spring boot easily.
- Strategies for Handling Failure :- Both framework support circuit-breaker, easy to integrate with Resilience4J for additional features like Retry, Timeout, Rate Limiting, fallback handler, Bulkheads. Though it’s easy to build resilient services with Spring Cloud.
- Observability :- Both framework support health check API, tracing and metrics.
- Communication Style :- Both framework support synchronous and reactive style API and good support for gRPC.
- Integration with Tools :- Spring Cloud has far better integration and abstraction when it comes to integrating with tools like Consul, Prometheus, Jaeger, Grafana, Kafka. Spring cloud have modules for various tools and cloud services.
- Security :- Spring security is mature and it has plenty of options to choose from, when it comes to securing your app.
- Distributed config management :- Both has good support for distributed config management.
- Service Discovery :- Spring cloud has good support for integrating with various third party tools for both client side and server side discovery. Helidon does not have inbuilt support.
- Learning Curve :- Spring have so many resources on all over the internet and big community for support. But Helidon is quite new in the game and if you stuck, won’t able to find resource quickly.
- Testing :- Spring testing is by far better and mature and almost mock everything quickly. Helidon lack this.
