Some of the challenges while developing microservices and web applications are as follows:

• Making framework choices and deciding compatible framework versions
• Providing mechanisms for externalizing configuration--properties that can change from one environment to another
• Health checks and monitoring--providing alerts if a specific part of the application is down
• Deciding the deployment environment and configuring the application for it

Spring Boot solves all these problems out of the box by taking an opinionated view of how applications have to be developed.

We will look at Spring Boot in depth in two chapters--Chapter 5, Building Microservices with Spring Boot and Chapter 7, Advanced Spring Boot Features.