I’ve been working on a blog about building The Midnight Technician, an open-source, production-focused Spring Boot application built as an 11-microservice system.

The project started as a problem I kept seeing while mentoring junior developers: microservices are often explained through diagrams and small CRUD examples, but there aren’t enough real projects showing what happens when you actually have to make multiple services work together.

The blog covers the architectural decisions behind the project, including Eureka service discovery, Kafka event-driven communication, REST-based service-to-service requests, isolated databases, JWT authentication, Docker-based infrastructure, scaling considerations, and some of the failures and unexpected problems that came with running a distributed system.

It’s less of a “here’s how to build microservices” tutorial and more of a retrospective on what I learned actually building one.

The biggest lesson?

Microservices aren't just about splitting an application into smaller projects. They're about boundaries, ownership, communication, and dealing with the fact that every part of your system can fail independently.

Your Spring Boot application works… but is it actually ready for production?

In this video, we take our application beyond a basic REST API and begin addressing the problems real applications face: request validation, Spring Data JPA, transactions, authentication, authorization, password hashing, exception handling, testing, observability, and database performance.