At a fundamental level, taking one big application (like we've built so far) and splitting it up into two or more microservices requires that the two systems communicate with each other. And to communicate, these systems need to find each other. This is known as service discovery.
The Netflix engineering team built a tool for this called Eureka, and open sourced it. Eureka provides the means for microservices to power up, advertise their existence, and shutdown as well. It supports multiple copies of the same service registering themselves, and allows multiple instances of Eureka to register with each other to develop a highly available service registry.
Standing up a Eureka Server is quite simple. We simply have to create a new application at http://start.spring.io:
Yes, that's correct. We create an entirely separate Spring Boot application using the Spring Initializr, apart from our functional application. And in the preceding screenshot...