Chapter 14. Managing configuration
This chapter covers
- Running Spring Cloud Config Server
- Creating Config Server clients
- Storing sensitive configuration
- Automatically refreshing configuration
Anyone who has bought a house or a car has probably encountered a thick stack of paper. The contracts you sign when making major purchases tend to thumb their nose at the promise of a paperless society. Whenever I sit across the table from a car dealer or a title agent, I feel as if I should request a stack of bandages before getting started, in preparation for the paper cuts I’ll almost certainly receive before we’re done.
I’ve noticed that although the number of pages I must sign has stayed constant in recent years, I don’t have to fill out as many fields on the forms as I once did. Where forms were once manually filled in, modern forms are more often prepopulated with basic data that was gathered before the forms were printed. This has not only made the process quicker, but has also reduced mistakes resulting from manual duplication of data across multiple forms.
Likewise, many applications have some form of configuration in play. In chapter 5 we talked about ways you can configure Spring Boot applications by setting configuration properties. Often, properties you might set are unique to the application, and it’s easy enough to specify those properties in the application.properties or application.yml file that’s packaged in your application’s deployment.