Comparison of Java Microservice Frameworks: Spring Cloud, Vert.x, SparkJava, Micronaut, Javalin, and Quarkus

Overall, Spring Boot is relatively easy to set up, especially the Spring Cloud suite (often called "friendly microservices"), but with the rise of containerization its large memory consumption makes it unaffordable for small companies. Consequently, many newly created Java microservice frameworks market themselves as "lightweight" because Spring Boot is considered too heavy.

Java Microservice Frameworks

No1 – Spring Cloud

Introduction

With the strong backing of Spring, concerns about updates, stability, and maturity are largely eliminated. Most Java developers have heard of Spring, so finding programmers is easy, and the entry barrier is low enough to skip hiring an architect.

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However, you will inevitably have to provision the following on your servers:

At least one service‑discovery server; A unified gateway (Gateway) may be required; A configuration center for distributed configuration management may be needed; Service tracing to know where requests come from and where they go; Cluster monitoring; After deployment, adding more servers to the cluster can feel costly.

Stress Test (30 seconds)

Memory usage before the test

As shown, memory usage is 304 MB.

Memory usage during the test

During the test, memory spikes to 1.5 GB (1520 MB) and CPU usage rises to 321%.

Overview

Summary

A simple Spring Boot application requires at least 1 GB of memory; a small‑business microservice JAR is about 50 MB. Adding Spring Cloud components increases resource consumption.

Startup time is roughly 10 seconds: Started Application in 10.153 seconds (JVM running for 10.915)

Java Reactive Programming Toolkit – Vert.x

Introduction

Vert.x, backed by the Eclipse foundation, is a toolkit for building reactive applications on the JVM. It does not conflict with Spring Boot and can even be combined with it. Numerous Vert.x modules provide microservice components, making it a viable microservice architecture choice.

Huawei's microservice framework Apache ServiceComb is built on Vert.x, and Vert.x performed impressively in the TechEmpower benchmark.

Stress Test (30 seconds)

Memory usage before the test

Memory usage is 65 MB.

Memory usage during the test

During the test, memory rises to 139 MB and CPU usage is 2.1%, giving the impression that the test was not very intensive.

Overview

Summary

A packaged Vert.x service results in a JAR of about 7 MB and does not depend on containers like Tomcat or Jetty; it runs directly on the JVM.

Vert.x consumes very few resources; a 1‑core, 2 GB server can host many Vert.x services. Apart from coding considerations, it fits small projects and modules well. An open‑source gateway implementation, VX‑API‑Gateway, is available on GitHub.

https://duhua.gitee.io/vx-api-gateway-doc

It supports multiple languages and is suitable for rapid deployment of small projects.

Startup time is under 1 second: Started Vert.x in 0.274 seconds (JVM running for 0.274)

Other Java Microservice Frameworks

SparkJava

JAR is relatively small, about 10 MB.

Memory footprint is low, around 30–60 MB.

Performance is comparable to Spring Boot.

Micronaut

New favorite of the Grails team.

Supports Java, Groovy, and Kotlin for microservice applications.

More comprehensive than Spring Boot.

Performance is better, with a coding style similar to Spring Boot.

More efficient in startup time and memory consumption.

Multi‑language support.

Dependency injection.

Built‑in many cloud‑native features.

Very new, version 1.0.0 just released.

Javalin

Extremely easy to get started.

Flexible, supporting both synchronous and asynchronous programming models.

JAR size is small, 4–5 MB.

Multi‑language support.

Inspired by KOA.

Only about 2,000 lines of source code, easy to understand and fix.

Fits current development trends.

Embedded Jetty server.

Quarkus

Fast startup.

JAR size is small, around 10 MB.

Documentation is limited.

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