Uncle Bob's Clean Architecture keeps your application flexible, testable, and highlights its use cases. But there is a cost: No idiomatic framework usage!
Spring Boot and Swagger 2 play together very well. Just add the dependencies, one configuration file, and a bunch of annotations, and you're ready to go!
Using local classes makes sense from an engineering point of view, but the principle of least surprise applies. Unless every team member is comfortable, don't use them.
If you're loading your Spring context for every test, you have integration tests, not unit tests. These are slow! See, how to deal with the problem using Mockito.
If you want enhanced control over your endpoints, including tuning sensitivity and security, you should familiarize yourself with Spring Boot Actuator and its tools.
Jenkins' Pipeline Plugin offers a simple way to configure all steps in the same place. You can do almost everything inside your pipeline without any additional plugins.
Accessing and configuring your MS SQL Server instance is pretty simple if you're using Spring Boot. After a bit of legwork, Spring fills in the defaults for you.