Reload configuration automatically

We have already discussed the most important features of Spring Cloud Config. At that point, we implemented examples illustrating how to use different backend storage as a repository. But no matter whether we decided to choose filesystem, Git, or Vault, our client-side application needed to restart to be able to fetch the newest configuration from the server. However, sometimes this is not an optimal solution, especially if we have many microservices running and some of them use the same generic configuration.

Solution architecture

Even if we created a dedicatedpropertyfile per single application, an opportunity to dynamically reload it without restart could be very helpful. As you may have deduced, such a solution is available for Spring Boot and therefore for Spring Cloud. In Chapter 4, Service Discovery while describing deregistration from the service discovery server, I introduced an endpoint, /shutdown, which may be used for gracefully shutting down...