Foundations of Microservices and REST APIs with Spring Boot

This course features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. Build the skills to design, develop, and secure scalable microservices using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. This course equips learners with a practical understanding of RESTful web services, API architecture, and the essential tools required to create robust backend solutions in Java. Whether you're new to microservices or seeking a structured foundation, this course provides the hands-on knowledge to get you started confidently. You’ll begin with an introduction to microservices architecture and how Spring Boot simplifies development. Then, you'll explore foundational concepts like installing the Java development environment, understanding SOAP vs REST, and learning how to build and expose RESTful APIs. From there, you’ll incrementally develop a complete REST API with advanced features including versioning, filtering, error handling, Swagger documentation, and authentication using Spring Security. The final sections dive deeper into microservices concepts, connecting your services with relational databases using JPA, Hibernate, and MySQL, and implementing scalable microservice patterns. You’ll also explore tools like Docker, HAL Explorer, and Actuator for deployment, monitoring, and exploration. This course is designed for developers with basic Java knowledge who want to learn backend API development and microservices design. It is ideal for aspiring full-stack developers, backend engineers, and system architects. A working knowledge of object-oriented programming is recommended. This is an intermediate-level course. By the end of the course, you will be able to build REST APIs with Spring Boot, integrate them with databases, implement microservice architecture with Spring Cloud, and deploy scalable, secure applications with confidence.