In the past year, Netflix shared a story about upgrading their main gateway serving 83 million users from Servlet-stack Zuul 1 to an async and non-blocking Netty-based Zuul 2. The results were interesting and nuanced with some major benefits as well as some trade-offs.

Can mere mortal web applications make this journey and moreover should they? The best way to explore the answer is through a specific use case. In this talk, we'll take 5 common use cases in web application development and explore the impact of building on Servlet and Reactive web application stacks.

For reactive programming, we'll use RxJava and Reactor. For the web stack, we'll pit Spring MVC vs Spring WebFlux (new in Spring 5) allowing us to move easily between the Servlet and Reactive worlds and drawing a meaningful, apples-to-apples comparison. Spring knowledge is not required and not assumed for this session.