Almost two years have passed since I wrote my first integration test for a Kafka Spring Boot application. It took me a lot of research to write this first integration test and I eventually ended up to write a blog post on testing Kafka with Spring Boot. There was not too much information out there about writing those tests and at the end it was really simple to do it, but undocumented. I have seen a lot of feedback and interaction with my previous blog post and the GitHub Gist. Since then spring-kafka-test changed two times the usage pattern and JUnit 5 has been introduces. That means the…

Integrating external services into an application is often challenging. Instead of doing the testing manually, the setup could be tested also automated. In case you are using Spring Boot, for a couple of services there exist an integration. This blog post will show how you can setup your Kafka tests to use an embedded Kafka server.

Storing dates in databases was traditionally done with java.sql.Date and java.sql.Timestamp. Since we would like to write modern applications, with Java 8 or 11, it is preferable to use an OffsetDateTime or a LocalDateTime. Spring Data JPA, for example, is mapping those fields automatically to the correct database field. There are still some challenges in combination with PostgreSQL.

Automated installation of buildpack with concourse is easy. In enterprise environment you might not want to install all buildpacks directly in production. This blog post shows you how developers can test their application before the buildpacks are in production and you are still up to date.

We planned to upgraded a PCF installation from 1.9 to 1.12 in less than 72 hours. During the upgrade we learned a lot. In this blog post it is described what you can learn and which tools we suggest. In addition, you can learn from our challanges during the upgrade with several redis nodes and the new relic service broker.