Spring Boot is a framework that makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based applications that you can "just run". It allows you to create stand-alone applications, embed Tomcat/Jetty directly with no need to deploy WAR files, and provides starter POMs to simplify configuration. Spring Boot applications are run by adding a spring-boot-gradle-plugin and can then be run as an executable JAR. Features include REST endpoints, security, external configuration, and production monitoring via Actuators.