Spring Cloud provides tools for developers to quickly build some of the common patterns in distributed systems (e.g. configuration management, service discovery, circuit breakers, intelligent routing, micro-proxy, control bus and short lived microservices).

Coordination of distributed systems leads to boiler plate patterns, and using Spring Cloud developers can quickly stand up services and applications that implement those patterns. They will work well in any distributed environment, including the developer’s own laptop, bare metal data centres, and managed platforms such as Cloud Foundry.

**Features**

Spring Cloud focuses on providing good out of box experience for typical use cases and extensibility mechanism to cover others.

- Distributed/versioned configuration

- Service registration and discovery

- Routing

- Service-to-service calls

- Load balancing

- Circuit Breakers

- Distributed messaging

- Short lived microservices (tasks)

**Getting Started**

The easiest way to get started is visit start.spring.io, select your Spring Boot version and the Spring Cloud projects you want to use. This will add the corresponding Spring Cloud BOM version to your Maven/Gradle file when you generate the project.

If you an existing Spring Boot app you want to add Spring Cloud to that app, the first step is to determine the version of Spring Cloud you should use. The version you use in your app will depend on the version of Spring Boot you are using. Once you determine which version of Spring Cloud to use, you should use the latest service release for that release train.