Spring-Boot on Abdelbaki Ben Elhaj Slimene

Migrating from SMTP to AWS SES with IAM Roles: A Security-First Approach to Email in Spring Boot

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sending emails is a fundamental requirement for most applications. Whether it’s transactional notifications, alerts, or user communications, we need a reliable and secure way to dispatch messages.

In this article, I’ll walk through our migration from traditional SMTP authentication to AWS SES with IAM role-based authentication, explaining why this shift represents a significant security improvement.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

The Traditional Approach: SMTP with Credentials

For years, the standard way to send emails from a Spring Boot application has been through SMTP with username and password authentication:

Creating OpenAPI 3.0 Documentation for a Spring REST API

Sun, 12 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Documenting REST APIs is important so that consumers of these APIs can know exactly how to integrate them into their systems. This documentation can be written manually, which will be time-consuming and error-prone, or generated automatically using libraries. Here comes to play the springdoc-openapi library.

In this blog post, we will see how to use this library and integrate it into our spring boot project to have up-to-date documentation of our REST APIs.

Custom Bean Instantiation Using @ConditionalOnProperty Annotation in Spring Boot

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Spring boot is a widely used framework to bootstrap standalone web applications. Its flexibility and capabilities in beans management make the life of the developer much easier compared to the manual handling of these components.

In this blog post, I will describe a use case where I needed the help of Spring Boot to create beans based on a configuration set in my application.yml file.

Problem Description

I was working on a notification service where depending on events received and the configuration set up, notifications of different types were sent to users. These notifications were emails, SMS messages and push notifications for mobile applications.

Spring Boot Profiles Best Practices

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Spring Boot profiles provide a powerful way to manage application configurations for different environments or scenarios. By using profiles, developers can easily customize the behavior of their applications based on the target environment, such as development, testing, production, or specific customer requirements.

This article explores the best practices for utilizing Spring Boot profiles, including defining and activating profiles, organizing configuration files, managing profile-specific dependencies, testing and debugging, and addressing common pitfalls. Understanding and implementing these best practices will help developers harness the full potential of Spring Boot profiles and enhance the flexibility, maintainability, and scalability of their applications.