55.4 Boxfuse and Amazon Web Services

Boxfuse works by turning your Spring Boot executable jar or war into a minimal VM image that can be deployed unchanged either on VirtualBox or on AWS. Boxfuse comes with deep integration for Spring Boot and will use the information from your Spring Boot configuration file to automatically configure ports and health check URLs. Boxfuse leverages this information both for the images it produces as well as for all the resources it provisions (instances, security groups, elastic load balancers, etc).

Once you have created a Boxfuse account, connected it to your AWS account, and installed the latest version of the Boxfuse Client, you can deploy your Spring Boot application to AWS as follows (ensure the application has been built by Maven or Gradle first using, for example, mvn clean package):

$ boxfuse run myapp-1.0.jar -env=prod

See the boxfuse run documentation for more options. If there is a boxfuse.com/docs/commandline/#configuration [boxfuse.conf] file present in the current directory, it will be consulted.

	Tip
By default Boxfuse will activate a Spring profile named boxfuse on startup and if your executable jar or war contains an boxfuse.com/docs/payloads/springboot.html#configuration [application-boxfuse.properties] file, Boxfuse will base its configuration based on the properties it contains.

At this point boxfuse will create an image for your application, upload it, and then configure and start the necessary resources on AWS:

Fusing Image for myapp-1.0.jar ...
Image fused in 00:06.838s (53937 K) -> axelfontaine/myapp:1.0
Creating axelfontaine/myapp ...
Pushing axelfontaine/myapp:1.0 ...
Verifying axelfontaine/myapp:1.0 ...
Creating Elastic IP ...
Mapping myapp-axelfontaine.boxfuse.io to 52.28.233.167 ...
Waiting for AWS to create an AMI for axelfontaine/myapp:1.0 in eu-central-1 (this may take up to 50 seconds) ...
AMI created in 00:23.557s -> ami-d23f38cf
Creating security group boxfuse-sg_axelfontaine/myapp:1.0 ...
Launching t2.micro instance of axelfontaine/myapp:1.0 (ami-d23f38cf) in eu-central-1 ...
Instance launched in 00:30.306s -> i-92ef9f53
Waiting for AWS to boot Instance i-92ef9f53 and Payload to start at http://52.28.235.61/ ...
Payload started in 00:29.266s -> http://52.28.235.61/
Remapping Elastic IP 52.28.233.167 to i-92ef9f53 ...
Waiting 15s for AWS to complete Elastic IP Zero Downtime transition ...
Deployment completed successfully. axelfontaine/myapp:1.0 is up and running at http://myapp-axelfontaine.boxfuse.io/

Your application should now be up and running on AWS.

There’s a blog on deploying Spring Boot apps on EC2 as well as documentation for the Boxfuse Spring Boot integration on their website that will get you started with a Maven build to run the app.