What is Spring Cloud?

The Spring Cloud project is an umbrella project from the Spring team that implements a set of common patterns required by distributed systems, as a set of easy-to-use Java Spring libraries. Despite its name, Spring Cloud by itself is not a cloud solution. Rather, it provides a number of capabilities that are essential when developing applications targeting cloud deployments that adhere to the Twelve-Factor application principles. By using Spring Cloud, developers just need to focus on building business capabilities using Spring Boot, and leverage the distributed, fault-tolerant, and self-healing capabilities available out of the box from Spring Cloud.

The Spring Cloud solutions are agnostic to the deployment environment, and can be developed and deployed in a desktop PC or in an elastic cloud. The cloud-ready solutions that are developed using Spring Cloud are also agnostic and portable across many cloud providers such as Cloud Foundry, AWS, Heroku, and so on. When not...