Spring AOT. Code Generation on Steroids.

Spring Boot’s magic comes at a cost: runtime proxies, reflection, and dynamic class generation slow down startup and inflate memory usage. While GraalVM Native Image promised a solution, its long build times and debugging complexity have kept many teams from adopting it.

But could we get the benefits — faster startup, lower memory — without going fully native?

Enter Spring AOT: a powerful shift from runtime magic to build-time optimization. In this talk, we’ll explore how Spring’s ahead-of-time processing generates leaner, faster applications — even on the JVM. You’ll see real performance gains, understand the core mechanics behind BeanFactoryInitializationAotProcessor, RuntimeHints, and generated code, and learn where AOT shines (and where it doesn’t).

Spoiler: Your Spring app doesn’t need to be a resource-hungry beast.