What I Learned Building a Microservices System
I have architected and developed many enterprise solutions using Spring Boot microservices for many years. Spring MVC, WebFlux, Integration, Batch, Data JPA, Security — that whole world is muscle memory. When I decided to try Quarkus, I expected it to be "Spring Boot on a diet." In some ways it is. In other ways, it is a genuinely different philosophy about what a Java framework should be.
I built a small microservices system: an identity service, a catalog service, an order service, and an API gateway — all backed by a single PostgreSQL instance with schema-level isolation, containerized with Docker Compose, and secured with JWT. The project lives at quarkus-panache-sample. Everything I describe below is drawn from that codebase.
This is not a Quarkus tutorial. It is a literature of discovery — the things that surprised me, the things that frustrated me, and the things that made me reconsider where I reach for which framework.
The First Surprise: Dev Mode Is Actually Fast
