Unless you are provisioning instances in a development account, always plan the instance count required, pay upfront, and leverage the many cloud savings plans at your disposal ( AWS Savings plans, Azure’s Cost Management and GCPs committed use discounts). Many cloud providers have different ways of leveraging the excess compute power they have by buying time on spot and reserved instances. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago

Apache Karaf with OSGi works pretty nice using annotation based dependency injection with the declarative services, removing the need to mess with those hopefully archaic XML blueprints. Too bad it's not as trendy as spring and the developers so many of the tutorials can be a bit dated and hard to find. Karaf also supports many other frameworks and programming models as well and there's even Red Hat supported... Source: about 3 years ago