Significance of Spring.application.name in Bootstrap.properties

Question

Hello I have a spring cloud config server setup. I have multiple profiles (environments): dev, prod, test, etc.

the contents of bootstrap.properties on a config client side are-

        spring.application.name=hazelcast,kafka.
        ....
        .... including uri of config server.

Now in my repository which the config server is pointing to, there is application.properties in addition to environment specific application-dev.properties, application-prod.properties etc. I also have hazelcast-dev.properties, hazelcast-prod.properties, kafka-dev.properties, kafka-prod.properties etc.

When I run my config client spring boot application with profiles.active set as dev. The config client is able to retrieve the following files from the server:

1.application.properties.

2.application-dev.properties.

3.hazelcast-dev.properties.

4.kafka-dev.properties.

And when i run with prod profiles active the corresponding prod files are retrieved (the values in them are added to spring's Environment).

Now this works and that's good, but I would like to understand the logic behind it. Is spring.application.name specifically meant for this?

http://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-static/spring-cloud-config/2.0.0.M5/single/spring-cloud-config.html

I went through the documentation and things weren't absolutely clear regarding it.

Thank you in advance!

EDIT-

https://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-static/spring-cloud.html#_application_context_hierarchies

The Section Bootstrap Application Context in the above link has almost answered my question but would appreciate someone to just confirm it.

Answer 1

It has a few different purposes. It is used as the application name when registering with a service registry such as eureka. It is also used to look up <applicationName>[-<profile>].[properties|yml] in configserver as well as configuration in consul or zookeeper.

Answer 2

In case you deploy a Spring-project on Openshift; Spring uses it to find resources declared in configmaps with the same name inside your openshift-project.