8 Cloud Native Features

The majority of frameworks in use today on the JVM were designed before the rise of cloud deployments and microservice architectures. Applications built with these frameworks were intended to be deployed to traditional Java containers. As a result, cloud support in these frameworks typically comes as an add-on rather than as core design features.

Micronaut was designed from the ground up for building microservices for the cloud. As a result, many key features that typically require external libraries or services are available within your application itself. To override one of the industry’s current favorite buzzwords, Micronaut applications are “natively cloud-native”.

The following are some of the cloud-specific features that are integrated directly into the Micronaut runtime:

• Distributed Configuration

• Service Discovery

• Client-Side Load-Balancing

• Distributed Tracing

• Serverless Functions

Many of the features in Micronaut and heavily inspired by features from Spring and Grails. This is by design and helps developers who are already familiar with systems such as Spring Cloud.

The following sections cover these features and how to use them.