In the previous parts of this tutorial, we successfully built a Todo application using React for the front end and Spring Boot for the back end, with a local MongoDB instance for storage. Now, we’ll focus on deploying the application into a production environment. This involves integrating MongoDB Atlas for our database, deploying the React front end on Vercel, and setting up a Spring Boot application on a virtual machine to host the back end. Additionally, we’ll explore the process of securing the back-end API with an HTTPS certificate, ensuring the application is both accessible and secure in a live environment.
The architecture for deploying this application in production requires careful consideration of how the three main components—MongoDB, the Spring API, and the React front end—will interact. We aim to simplify where possible by using managed services for the database and front-end deployment while maintaining control over the back-end server. To achieve this, we’ll leverage MongoDB Atlas for a cloud-based, fully managed database, a Spring Web API hosted on a virtual machine in Google Cloud, and a serverless React front end deployed via Vercel.
MongoDB Atlas provides a highly available, secure, and fully managed database solution. By using this platform, we can offload the complexity of database management while ensuring the application can scale as needed. For the Spring API, we will deploy it on a virtual machine, giving us more control over the environment and configuration, which is crucial for handling the business logic and interactions with MongoDB. Lastly, we’ll host the React front end on Vercel, a serverless platform that simplifies deployment and scaling for static websites and front-end applications. This choice allows us to focus on the React application without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
While deploying to production, we also need to ensure that our back-end API is secure. We’ll configure HTTPS using a self-signed certificate to secure the communication between the front end and the back end. Although this won’t be a production-grade SSL certificate, it serves the purpose of encrypting the data between the client and server in a development or testing environment. As we move forward, we’ll discuss how to optimize the deployment and further secure the application, along with potential CI/CD pipeline integrations for automated deployments in the future.