Caching with Hazelcast and Spring Cache for Improved Performance in Spring Boot Applications
Caching is an important optimization technique that can help improve the performance of your Spring application. By caching frequently accessed data in memory, you can reduce the number of expensive database queries and network requests required to retrieve data, resulting in faster response times and improved scalability.
Hazelcast is an open-source, distributed, in-memory data grid that can be used to store and manage large amounts of data across multiple nodes. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Hazelcast as a cache for a Spring Boot application using Spring Cache.
Getting Started with Hazelcast
To get started with Hazelcast, you’ll need to add the Hazelcast dependencies to your project’s build file. For a Maven project, you can add the following dependencies to your pom.xml file:
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<dependency> <groupId>com.hazelcast</groupId> <artifactId>hazelcast</artifactId> <version>5.0</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>com.hazelcast</groupId> <artifactId>hazelcast-spring</artifactId> <version>5.0</version> </dependency> |
These dependencies will provide you with the Hazelcast client and the Spring integration for Hazelcast.
Configuring Hazelcast
Once you’ve added the dependencies, you’ll need to configure Hazelcast in your Spring Boot application. You can do this by creating a HazelcastInstance bean in your application context:
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@Configuration public class HazelcastConfig { @Bean public HazelcastInstance hazelcastInstance() { Config config = new Config(); return Hazelcast.newHazelcastInstance(config); } } |
In this example, we’re creating a HazelcastInstance bean using the default configuration. This will create a single Hazelcast node running in embedded mode in your Spring Boot application.
Using Hazelcast as a Cache with Spring Cache
Once you’ve configured Hazelcast, you can use it as a cache with Spring Cache. To do this, you’ll need to create a CacheManager bean that uses the HazelcastCacheManager implementation:
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@Configuration @EnableCaching public class CacheConfig { @Autowired private HazelcastInstance hazelcastInstance; @Bean public CacheManager cacheManager() { return new HazelcastCacheManager(hazelcastInstance); } } |
In this example, we’re creating a CacheManager bean that uses the HazelcastCacheManager implementation and the HazelcastInstance bean created earlier.
Next, we’ll need to annotate our service methods with Spring Cache annotations to enable caching. For example, consider the following service method:
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@Service public class MyService { @Cacheable(value = "myCache", key = "#id") public Mono<MyObject> getById(String id) { // ... } } |
In this example, we’re using the @Cacheable annotation to cache the result of the getById() method. The value attribute specifies the name of the cache, while the key attribute specifies the key that should be used to cache the result. In this case, we’re using the ID of the object as the cache key.
If the result of the getById() method is already in the cache, the cached value will be returned instead of executing the method. If the result is not in the cache, the method will be executed and the result will be cached using the specified cache name and key.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we’ve shown you how to use Hazelcast as a cache for a Spring Boot application using Spring Cache. By leveraging the power of caching, you can significantly improve the performance of your Spring application by reducing the number of expensive database queries and network requests required to retrieve data.
With Hazelcast and Spring Cache, you can easily configure and use caching in your Spring application without having to write any complex caching logic yourself. Hazelcast’s distributed in-memory data grid ensures that your cache remains highly available and scalable, even under heavy load.
Give Hazelcast and Spring Cache a try in your next Spring Boot project and see the performance benefits for yourself.
