skill interview prepUpdated 2026

Spring Boot interview questions and answers

Skill-first preparation for Spring Boot interviews with practical execution patterns.

Questions

Interview question bank

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Spring Boot is an opinionated layer on top of Spring that auto-configures beans, embeds servers (Tomcat/Jetty), and provides starter dependencies. Spring Framework alone requires manual XML/Java config for dispatchers, data sources, and component scanning.

Likely follow-up

When would you still choose plain Spring over Boot?

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Interview question bank

What is Spring Boot and how does it differ from the Spring Framework?

Explain @Component, @Service, @Repository, and @Controller.

How does Spring Boot auto-configuration work?

What is the purpose of spring-boot-starter-parent?

Difference between @RestController and @Controller?

How do you externalize configuration in Spring Boot?

Explain Spring profiles and a real use case.

What is dependency injection and which injection types does Spring support?

How does @Autowired resolve multiple beans of the same type?

What is the Spring application context lifecycle on startup?

How do you create a REST endpoint that returns 201 Created?

Explain @RequestBody vs @RequestParam vs @PathVariable.

How does Spring MVC handle validation?

What is @ControllerAdvice used for?

How do you implement global exception handling returning ProblemDetail (RFC 7807)?

Explain Spring Data JPA repository interfaces.

What is the N+1 query problem in JPA and how do you fix it?

Difference between save() and saveAndFlush()?

How do you configure a connection pool in Spring Boot?

What are Spring Boot Actuator endpoints and why use them?

How do you implement caching with Spring Boot?

Explain @Transactional — propagation and rollback rules.

Why does @Transactional not work on private methods?

How do you write integration tests for Spring Boot APIs?

Difference between @WebMvcTest and @SpringBootTest?

How does Spring Security filter chain work in Boot?

How do you secure REST APIs with JWT in Spring Boot?

What is Spring Boot DevTools and what does it do?

How do you schedule periodic tasks?

Explain async execution with @Async.

How do you integrate Kafka with Spring Boot?

What is Spring Cloud OpenFeign?

How do you implement circuit breaker pattern?

What is the difference between monolith and microservices deployment of Spring Boot?

How do you optimize Spring Boot startup time?

Explain Bean scopes in Spring.

How do you map entities to DTOs — manual vs MapStruct?

What is OpenAPI/Swagger integration in Spring Boot?

How do you handle file uploads?

Describe a production incident you would debug with Spring Boot logs and Actuator.

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