[james-mcelwain]

Spring is really nice, but all the flexibility comes at a cost. Annotation meta-programming, runtime reflection, constructing proxies, classpath scanning... all contribute to a perception of slow JVM startup times that makes something like Spring Boot unsuitable for really small services or utilities.

I know there are other Java frameworks out there that are more optimized for smaller modular projects, but there's also the cost of operationalizing the JVM in something like Docker. Fat JAR deployments are relatively simple, but tuning the JVM isn't always straightforward. I'm definitely jealous of the simplicity of producing a single binary as your deployment artifact.