Spring Boot Interview Question: Designing Exception Handling in a Real Service

Exception for Observability, Concepts and Code Examples

Scenario

You are building a Spring Boot service that processes invoices.

For each request the service:

1. Loads invoice data from the database

2. Calls an external billing API

3. Publishes an event to Kafka

Each step can throw checked exceptions (SQLException, IOException, serialization errors).

A junior developer wrote this:

The feature works — but the code is hard to …