Spring Initializr is provided by the Spring team and can be used to configure and generate new Spring Boot applications. The tool helps developers to choose additional Spring modules to be used by the application and ensures that dependencies are configured to use compatible versions of the selected modules. The tool supports the use of either Maven or Gradle as a build system and can generate source code for either Java, Kotlin, or Groovy.

It can either be invoked from a web browser using the URL https://start.spring.io/ or by a command-line tool, spring init. To make it easier to reproduce the creation of the microservices, we will use the command-line tool.

For each microservice, we will create a Spring Boot project that does the following:

Uses Gradle as a build tool

Generates code for Java 8

Packages the project as a fat JAR file

Brings in dependencies for the Actuator and WebFlux Spring modules

Is based on Spring Boot v2.5.2 (which depends on Spring Framework v5.3.8)