The Spring IoC container is responsible for managing the lifecycle of beans, from instantiation to destruction. Understanding this lifecycle is crucial for developing robust Spring applications, as it allows developers to hook into key phases to customize bean behavior. The five main steps are:

• Instantiation

  The Spring container creates an instance of the bean.

• Dependency Injection (Populate Properties)

  Spring injects dependencies and sets property values.

• Initialization (@PostConstruct)

  The container calls initialization methods, such as those defined by awareness interfaces, post-processors, or custom init-methods.

• In Use

  The bean is ready to be used by the application.

• Destruction (@PreDestroy)

  Before the bean is destroyed, the container calls any configured destruction callbacks (e.g., destroy-method).