A Spring Boot service doesn't have to Microservice - you can happily fatten it up into a monolith. Cloud-only dependencies would come into play for Spring cloud (or something that is using cloud specific features) - for a "vanilla" CRUD app, they are not needed. Creating virtual/physical environments is out of Spring Boot's scope and better left to external tools though it has support for separate environments via profiles. ORMs/tooling that wraps database doesn't have to be part of Spring Boot - using Hibernate/JPA isn't mandatory; plain JDBC Template with hand-written SQLs would work fine.