The Eclipse Foundation’s MicroProfile project to add microservices to enterprise Java has released MicroProfile 1.2, which adds capabilities for fault tolerance and security.
New features in MicroProfile 1.2
A fault-tolerance API in MicroProfile 1.2 provides a way for applications to deal with the unavailability of a microservice, said IBM Distinguished Engineer Ian Robinson, who has worked on MicroProfile. When old-style monolithic applications fail, they bring down the entire application. But applications composed of microservices continue to operate if a specific microservcie fails, leading to “more interesting failure scenarios,” he said. To deal with service failures, applications need a way of handling the unavailability of a service, such as to resort to a fallback service if a primary service is unavailable. Such fallbacks are what MicroProfile 1.2 allows.
MicroProfile 1.2 also adds Interoperability with JSON web tokens. With JWT, you can provider a security token in a standard format, so it propagates from one microservice to another.
An externalized configuration capability in MicroProfile 1.2 provides a standard way to import an application configuration from outside a Docker container.
MicroProfile 1.2 also features:
- Common annotations.
- Metrics.
- Health checking.
Where to download MicroProfile 1.2
The source code for MicroProfile 1.2 is available for downloads at an Eclipse webpage.