With more and more applications moving to the cloud, it is important for developers and architects to start thinking in terms of applications which are ready for cloud deployment. Spring cloud in an umbrella which consists of a set of spring projects that can help us create applications which are cloud ready. The advantage of using a spring cloud is that you get a solution to most of the challenges you face when you deploy on the cloud at one place.

Let’s look at some of the core tools provided by spring cloud.

Spring Config: An important challenge distributed applications poses is how to manage your configurations. Each application and service need to manage some configuration properties. Spring config server provides a centralized way to manage configurations. It can read configuration from multiple sources, by default it would expect the configuration to be available at Git, but this can be modified. The most important factor of about using spring configuration server is that you can refresh properties or configuration in services without the need for redeployment or restarting the services.

Discovery service- Eureka: Spring cloud borrows a lot of services from Netflix open sourced projects. Eureka is one such service from Netflix, which provides a discovery mechanism for services deployed, Spring provides seamless integration to Eureka. With a design supporting deployment and autoscaling fo microservices, this becomes important the services can be deployed and removed on the fly without manual interaction. A challenge in this approach is how will the calling services know about the location or URL for the services to be called. A discovery service mechanism provided by Eureka comes to help. Any new service getting added to the system will register itself with Eureka server. A service that needs to access this remote service will communicate with the Eureka server and ask for the service location. Eureka server returns the location of the service, which is then accessed by the client service.

Fault Tolerance with Hytrix: Another important factor one needs to be worried about is how failure is managed in an application. In a distributed system, where multiple services are calling each other, will the failure in a service bring down the whole system? Or is there a way we can contain the failure to a single service. Spring integrates with hystrix, which again is a project by Netflix, that provides us mechanism like a circuit breaker to manage failures in an application. For example, if a remote service is down or not responding, Hystrix helps us configure an alternate service or method which can take over. Also, we can add settings that after N number of failures, client service will stop calling remote service (the circuit is open), and set a timer when next retry happens (if the service has healed itself, operations continue as usual).

Routing with Zuul: With multiple services being part of the system, it becomes difficult for client service to keep a track of all the remote services. A routing gateway in such an environment is like a front gate, behind which all the services are available. A client system need not be aware of details of deployment of each service, and it will just request routing server to get the required information, which in turn will communicate with remote service and returns a response. The advantage of this approach is we can implement security, logging, auditing of incoming requests in a centralized manner and each individual service need not worry about these factors.

Load Balancing with Ribbon: Load balancing is an important feature in order to manage autoscaling of the services. If there are 10 instances of a service, we want to make sure each of the instances manages almost equal load to take advantage of scale. Load balancing can be implemented at the server level for which various cloud service provider already give us a certain option. But there can be cases when you want to implement Load balancing at the client side. For this, Spring integrates with Ribbon project from Netflix and provide us seamless load balancing with the help of annotations like @LoadBalance and @RibbonClient.

Additional Spring Cloud projects: As already mentioned spring cloud is an umbrella which contains a number of projects that help us make our application cloud ready. The number of projects under this umbrella keeps on increasing with an increase in the popularity of cloud-based deployment and distributed applications. For a detailed view of all the projects under spring cloud, one can visit and explore projects under https://spring.io/projects/spring-cloud