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Chioma Nwosu
Chioma Nwosu

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I Just Deployed 8 Microservices with One Command 🚀

#devops #docker #monitoring #microservices

One of the biggest shifts in my DevOps journey has been moving from simple container deployments to full microservices environments.

Recently, I deployed the Spring PetClinic Microservices application using Docker Compose.

What surprised me most?

The entire environment started with:

docker compose up -d
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That's it.

Behind that single command were:

✅ Config Server

✅ Eureka Discovery Server

✅ API Gateway

✅ Customers Service

✅ Visits Service

✅ Vets Service

✅ GenAI Service

✅ Admin Server

Plus a complete observability stack:

✅ Prometheus

✅ Grafana

✅ Zipkin

What I Learned

Service Startup Order Matters

Config Server and Eureka must be available before the other services can start correctly.

Without them:

  • Services fail registration
  • Configuration isn't loaded
  • Communication breaks

This helped me understand why dependency management is so important in distributed systems.

Monitoring Changes Everything

Using Prometheus and Grafana, I could see application metrics in real time.

Instead of guessing what was happening, I had actual visibility into:

  • Requests
  • Health checks
  • Service activity

Prometheus console

Live metrics from Grafana

Debugging Is Part of the Process

One interesting challenge was that some backend APIs were working correctly while certain frontend pages didn't always render data.

API tests returned valid responses, but browser requests occasionally produced 405 and 503 errors.

This reinforced a valuable lesson:

Infrastructure success and application success aren't always the same thing.

Favourite Part

Honestly?

Seeing an entire microservices ecosystem running on my machine was incredibly satisfying.

Watching services register themselves in Eureka, viewing metrics in Grafana, and querying Prometheus made everything feel much closer to a real production environment.

Spring Petclinic app

Commands Used 

git clone https://github.com/spring-petclinic/spring-petclinic-microservices.git

cd spring-petclinic-microservices

docker compose up -d

docker compose ps

docker compose down
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Final Thoughts

This project gave me hands-on exposure to:

  • Docker
  • Microservices
  • Service Discovery
  • Monitoring
  • Distributed Systems
  • Observability

Every project like this makes me more confident in my goal of becoming a Cloud and DevOps Engineer.

What's the most complex application you've ever deployed locally?

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