Continuous Delivery in Java

Chapter 8. Working Locally (Like It Was Production)

Before you can begin to construct a continuous delivery pipeline, you must first ensure that you can work efficiently and effectively with code and systems on a local development machine. In this chapter, you will explore several of the inherent challenges with this—particularly when working with modern distributed systems and service-based architectures—and then discusses techniques like mocking, service virtualization, infrastructure virtualization (both VM and container-based), and local development of FaaS applications.

Challenges with Local Development

As a Java developer, you will typically be used to configuring a simple local work environment for working with a traditional monolithic web application. This often involves installing an operating system, a Java Development Kit (JDK), a build tool (Maven or Gradle), and an integrated development environment (IDE), like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse. Sometimes you may also need to install middleware or a database, and perhaps an application server. This local development configuration works fine for a single Java application, but what happens when you are developing a system with multiple services that will be deployed into a cloud environment, a container orchestration framework, or a serverless platform?

When you start working with an application with multiple services, the most logical initial approach is to simply attempt to replicate your local development practices for each ...