Building a Reactive Microservice Architecture with Spring Cloud, WebFlux, and MongoDB

Spring Cloud traditionally uses synchronous REST calls via RestTemplate or Feign, but with Spring Cloud Finchley we can build a completely reactive stack using WebFlux and Spring Data Reactive.

Prerequisites : a single‑node Eureka server, two microservices (account and customer), and a MongoDB instance (run via Docker).

Start Eureka Server :

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-server</artifactId>
</dependency>

spring:
  application:
    name: eureka-server
  eureka:
    client:
      register-with-eureka: false
      fetch-registry: false
      service-url:
        defaultZone: http://localhost:8000/eureka/
server:
  port: 8000

@EnableEurekaServer
@SpringBootApplication
public class EurekaServerApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(EurekaServerApplication.class, args);
    }
}

Account Service (cloud‑account) :

docker run -d --name mongo -p 27017:27017 mongo

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb-reactive</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-webflux</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.projectlombok</groupId>
    <artifactId>lombok</artifactId>
    <optional>true</optional>
</dependency>

spring:
  application:
    name: cloud-account
server:
  port: 8100
eureka:
  client:
    service-url:
      defaultZone: http://localhost:8000/eureka/

@AllArgsConstructor
@NoArgsConstructor
@Data
@Document(collection = "accounts")
public class Account {
    @Id
    private String id;
    private String customerId;
    private Double amount;
}

public interface AccountMongoReactiveRepository extends ReactiveCrudRepository
{
    Flux
findByCustomerId(String customerId);
}

@RequestMapping("/account")
@RestController
public class AccountController {
    @Autowired
    private AccountMongoReactiveRepository repository;

    @GetMapping("/customer/{customer}")
    public Flux
findByCustomer(@PathVariable("customer") String customer) {
        System.out.println("Customer => " + customer + " [ " +
            LocalDateTime.now().format(DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("HH:mm:ss.SSS")) + " ]");
        return repository.findByCustomerId(customer);
    }
}

Customer Service (cloud‑customer) uses the same dependencies and a similar configuration, only changing the application name and port (8200).

spring:
  application:
    name: cloud-customer
server:
  port: 8200
eureka:
  client:
    service-url:
      defaultZone: http://localhost:8000/eureka/

@Data
@AllArgsConstructor
@NoArgsConstructor
@Document(collection = "customers")
public class Customer {
    @Id
    private String id;
    private String name;
    private String mobile;
}

public interface CustomerMongoReactiveRepository extends ReactiveCrudRepository
{}

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/customer")
public class CustomerController {
    @Autowired
    private CustomerMongoReactiveRepository repository;
    @Autowired
    private WebClient.Builder webClientBuilder;

    @GetMapping("")
    public Flux
list() {
        return repository.findAll();
    }

    @GetMapping("/{id}")
    public Mono
get(@PathVariable String id) {
        return repository.findById(id);
    }

    @PostMapping("")
    public Mono
create(@RequestBody Customer customer) {
        return repository.save(customer);
    }

    @PutMapping("/{id}")
    public Mono
update(@PathVariable("id") String id, @RequestBody Customer customer) {
        customer.setId(id);
        return repository.save(customer);
    }

    @DeleteMapping("/{id}")
    public Mono
delete(@PathVariable String id) {
        return repository.deleteById(id);
    }

    @GetMapping("/{id}/account")
    public Flux
getAllAccounts(@PathVariable String id) {
        return webClientBuilder.baseUrl("http://cloud-account/account/")
                .build()
                .get()
                .uri("/customer/" + id)
                .retrieve()
                .bodyToFlux(Account.class);
    }
}

WebClient Configuration (load‑balanced):

@Configuration
public class WebClientConfig {
    @Bean
    @LoadBalanced
    public WebClient.Builder loadBalancedWebClientBuilder() {
        return WebClient.builder();
    }
}

Running two instances of cloud‑account (ports 8100 and 8101) and invoking http://localhost:8200/customer/{id}/account shows alternating timestamps, confirming that WebClient together with Ribbon provides client‑side load balancing.

Conclusion : The example covers service registration, reactive data access, and non‑blocking inter‑service calls, achieving a full reactive stack backend. It illustrates the practical steps needed to move from traditional synchronous Spring Cloud services to a fully reactive, cloud‑native architecture.