Parent pom and microservices

Question

• We have several projects that are microservices, every project is independent (running on separate spring boot server, exposing rest services, using separate DB schema

Answer 1

A major drawback of using a parent pom approach with microservices is it will make the release management for microservices a slightly tricky affair. Few related pointers -

• The parent pom should not be frequently changed, should be managed as a separate project in a separate repo.
• Every change to the parent pom should increment the parent pom version. Once the changes are finalized, the parent pom repo should also be tagged. (treating is as a separate library with independent releases)
• Moreover the child pom of all the microservices being touched should ideally be updated to point to the latest parent pom version (affecting the autonomy of microservices to some extent). This may also lead to forceful ask of upgrading the microservice to use newer versions of the libraries, which may not always be a feasible option.
• Even if the only change in a microservice is to point to the new parent pom version, it would call for a new (mostly minor) version release of the service.

Suggestions -

• You can use the maven enforcer plugin to check for duplicate dependency versions specified between parent and child poms.
• The parent pom will not be a good option for extensive dependencies and dependency-management, but can certainly be used for things like repositories, distribution management, and plugin management which shall generally not have clashes between microservices.