A Common Pitfall of Spring Boot's RestTemplate

Spring Boot's convention over configuration approach simplifies development by using default settings, but it poses reliability issues, particularly with the default behavior of its RestTemplateBuilder, which lacks timeout configurations. This oversight can lead to problems under adverse conditions, such as network disruptions. The blog post demonstrates how to identify and address this issue using chaos experiments with Steadybit, a platform that allows testing without altering the source code. By simulating network disturbances, the experiment reveals that the application hangs without timeouts, prompting the need to explicitly configure connection and read timeouts for the RestTemplate. After implementing these changes, re-running the experiment confirms improved application resilience, highlighting the necessity of customizing default settings to ensure reliability under challenging conditions. The post concludes by emphasizing the importance of considering potential disruptions even when working with established frameworks and offers a free trial or demo of the Steadybit platform for further exploration.