Spring Boot starters are dependency descriptors that bring in everything one feature needs through a single entry in your build file. Add spring-boot-starter-data-jpa, and you get Spring Data JPA and Hibernate at versions tested together.
Commonly used starters:
spring-boot-starter-webmvc: web apps and REST APIs with Spring MVC and Tomcat. Before Spring Boot 4 it was spring-boot-starter-web, which still works but is deprecated.
spring-boot-starter-data-jpa: JPA with Hibernate
spring-boot-starter-security: Spring Security
spring-boot-starter-test: testing with JUnit and Mockito
spring-boot-starter-actuator: monitoring and management
spring-boot-starter-data-redis: Redis data access
spring-boot-starter-mail: email support
You leave the versions off. Spring Boot's dependency management picks them, so upgrading Spring Boot upgrades the whole set.
Rewriting in plainer words…
This answer doesn't lend itself to a diagram - it reads best . No credits were charged.
