Spring Cloud – Everything you need to know

Introduction 

If you are not from a technological background and are venturing in this direction for the first time then this article is just what you need. Get to know about the applications and uses of spring cloud and what it has to offer in the IT sector through this Spring Cloud article.

1. What is spring cloud?
2. Spring cloud components
3. Spring cloud features
4. Projects of spring cloud 
5. Spring boot 
6. Difference between spring boot and spring cloud

1. What is spring cloud?

Spring Cloud is a very easy to use tool for developers to break down and build otherwise complicated patterns in what we call distributed systems that are basically networks of interlinked autonomous computers. This includes things like configuration management (maintaining and establishing the operational information and consistency of a product’s performance), intelligent routing (sending inbound customer communications to the right place), and many other such attributes. Spring cloud works perfectly in all well-distributed environments and offers great precision and efficiency. Spring cloud aims to engage its users with new and out of the box ideas and mechanisms of performance.

2. Spring cloud components

• Configuration – configuration is a very essential component of spring cloud because it maintains server-side to client-side relations in the form of externalized configuration in all distributed systems.
• service discovery – client-side discovery and server-side discovery are the two types of discovery patterns that are maintained by spring cloud. Service discovery is basically how any application connects to the distributed environment.
• Circuit breakers – the circuit breaker as the name suggests has three modes namely open, closed and half-open and the work of the circuit breaker is to handle failures of the application with ease and grace.it comes into play when sites crash at some point, whatever may be the reason for it. in the open phase, the circuit returns an error call, in the closed phase the circuit responds without any latency, and in the half-open phase, the circuit only returns the external calls with an error.
• Routing and messaging – both these components add a very important facet to spring cloud and that is communication. Whereas routing uses Netflix ribbon and opens feign, messaging makes use of Rabbit MQ or Kafka.
• API gateway – it allows one to connect services (externally and internally). Its main aim is to furnish monitoring and security. Some of its features are Hystrix circuit breaker integration, spring cloud discovery client integration, request late limiting, and path rewriting.
• Tracing – getting data from an application in a single request is called distributed tracing.it technically helps the microservices by resulting in a higher number of results.
• CI pipeline and testing – for a successful cloud-native application, a self-opinionated pipeline is extremely necessary. Spring Cloud provides an important pipeline for Jenkins and concourse.

3. Spring cloud features

• Intelligent routing and service discovery – it combines the two primary microservices namely configuration service and discovery service.it blends the two with the help of recommendation service and movie service, thus all four microservices are interdependent and cannot function without even one.
• Service to service calls – registering the service followed by fetching of the registry, downstream service, resolving the underlying IP address issue, and calling the endpoint is what this service is about. It is mainly responsible for the smooth communication of a microservice with the other dependent services.
• Load balancing – the redistribution of data traffic to multiple back end networks or servers for easy flow of resources is what load balancing is about in a nutshell.it maximizes the output with a minimum increase in response time and lagging.
• Leadership election – working of the application with other different applications with the involvement of a third-party system comes under leadership election.it provides global ordering without having to make any sacrifices on availability.
• Global locks – this feature is essential in order to assure the smooth working of an application; it prevents a single resource from being accessed simultaneously by two threads. This further ensures the correct directional flow of data or resources.
• Distributed configuration – offers a central place to manage external components of an application across all environments.
• Distributed messaging – equips the application with persistence, reliability, and scalability. The publish-subscribe model is followed in messaging patterns.

4. Projects of spring cloud 

• Spring cloud connectors – aims at supplying a simple conception. Provides unique support for discovering services on Heroku a cloud foundry platform.
• Spring cloud pipelines – increases the response time of the application to offer a feature 
• Spring cloud streams – makes use of tools to give a highly commercially viable microservice.
• Spring Cloud Netflix – Netflix OSS components like Eureka, Zuul, hysteric, etc. are integrated with the application very easily with this project.
• Spring cloud bus – state changes and management instructions can be efficiently broadcasted with the help of this lightweight text broker.
• Spring cloud zookeepers – configuration management and service discovery with apache zookeeper are handled by this feature.
• Spring cloud task app starters – can be used to create, deploy, and orchestrate microservices. Machine learning, scheduled operations, database migration, etc. are some of on-demand use cases where it can be used.
• Spring Cloud CLI – services like eureka, Zipkin, etc. can be conveniently launched with this command line feature of sparing cloud.
• Spring cloud sleuth – distributed tracing solution for spring cloud 
• Spring cloud data flow – complicated topologies for data streaming data processing use cases are supported by spring cloud data flow.
• Spring cloud contract – microservices are deployed end to end. Verifies the consumer-driven contract (CDC) which is basically a contract that informs the users of their consumer obligations and ensures delivery of key business functionality.
• Spring Cloud AWS – comes under the spring cloud umbrella project. Offers easy and efficient accessibility with the amazon web services. The developer does not have to take a lot of care for the maintenance of the microservice.
• Spring cloud cluster – examples include global locks and leadership election.

5. Spring boot 

Spring boot is similar to spring framework but it has other features like auto – configurators, starters, CLI etc.

6. Difference between spring boot and spring cloud

Whereas spring boot is a more open-source java-based framework, spring cloud works on centralized configuration management and offers utmost security and integrity. Spring Cloud has multiple dependencies whereas spring boot is a light framework and has fewer dependencies in comparison. Another key point of difference is that spring cloud is primarily used to develop microservices but spring boot is used for standalone web applications and runs them rapidly. Spring boot is bounded in contrast to spring cloud that has a number of dependencies. If one has to find multiple services in one application then spring cloud is the way to go.

Conclusion

After reading this article we hope that you have a clearer and well-read understanding of what spring cloud is all about, what it offers, and what are the various prospects related to it in different industries.

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