In order to be immediately productive and as effective as possible using Spring Boot for Apache Geode/Pivotal GemFire, it is helpful to understand the foundation on which this project was built.

Of course, our story begins with the Spring Framework and the core technologies and concepts built into the Spring container.

Then, our journey continues with the extensions built into Spring Data for Apache Geode & Pivotal GemFire (SDG^[3]) to truly simplify the development of Apache Geode & Pivotal GemFire applications in a Spring context, using Spring’s powerful abstractions and highly consistent programming model. This part of the story was greatly enhanced in Spring Data Kay, with the SDG^[1] Annotation-based configuration model. Though this new configuration approach using annotations provides sensible defaults out-of-the-box, its use is also very explicit and assumes nothing. If any part of the configuration is ambiguous, SDG will fail fast. SDG gives you "choice", so you still must tell SDG^[1] what you want.

Next, we venture into Spring Boot and all of its wonderfully expressive and highly opinionated "convention over configuration" approach for getting the most out of your Spring, Apache Geode/Pivotal GemFire based applications in the easiest, quickest and most reliable way possible. We accomplish this by combining Spring Data for Apache Geode/Pivotal GemFire’s Annotation-based configuration with Spring Boot’s auto-configuration to get you up and running even faster and more reliably so that you are productive from the start.

As such, it would be pertinent to begin your Spring Boot education here.

Finally, we arrive at Spring Boot for Apache Geode & Pivotal GemFire (SBDG).