Practical notes from building and running enterprise systems: Java and Spring Boot, IBM integration, Red Hat OpenShift and identity & access management.
Getting a Spring Boot service to start on OpenShift takes five minutes. Getting it to behave well in production (rolling updates without errors, sensible memory use, configuration per environment) takes a few deliberate choices. This is the checklist I follow.
When an organization runs many services, each one managing its own users quickly becomes a security problem. Keycloak centralizes authentication. Your Spring Boot APIs only need to check the token that comes with each request.
IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE), the successor of IBM Integration Bus, is the integration engine inside IBM Cloud Pak for Integration. It connects systems that were never designed to talk to each other: an ERP, a REST API, a message queue, a file drop, a partner's SOAP service.
This is the mental model I wish I'd had on day one.
Teams that have both IBM App Connect Enterprise and Spring Boot often ask the same question: should this go in ACE or in a service? Choosing badly leads to business rules hidden in integration flows, or hand-written plumbing that ACE would have handled for free.
Here's how I decide.