Spring Cloud Components

Introduction to Spring Cloud Components

Spring cloud components are easy to plug and play tools that allow the developer to build common use patterns for a distributed system. Usage of distribution systems leads to boilerplate patterns and spring cloud comes in handy while developing services and applications using those patterns. Boilerplate patterns are a way of writing where the code can be reused over without modifying the code. These patterns allow accelerated development of code. Spring cloud components are a bit different from templates as the latter adapts to a particular use case whereas spring cloud components are generic in fashion.

What is Spring Cloud Components?

• Spring cloud components are bits and bytes of Spring cloud and referred to as the building blocks of the spring cloud architecture. Spring Cloud is an open-source library that facilitates the development of JVM applications on the cloud. Now the question arises on why do we want to run services/applications on the cloud? What do we get to benefit from it?
• There are many advantages of running an application in the cloud is abundance and easy availability of services. Rather than worrying about managing hardware, operations, crash backups, etc. one simply creates services using a button click or a shell script. For example, if there is a relational database bound to our application, the Spring cloud will remove the redundant work of trying to access and configuring the method of connectors and instead let the developer focus on what is more important like the functionality of the services.
• The functionality of the spring cloud is independent of cloud type. If functionality is implemented for a particular cloud provider, it can be easily extended to others by either interface implementation or taking advantage of the rest of the library.
• It is virtually impossible to support each kind of service on the cloud, hence supporting many services it also allows the user to extend functionality to develop custom-tailored services. Last but not least, there is a provision of special support for Spring application on the cloud. These applications are in the form of Java or XML, and the application and services properties are exposed in a way that is easy to be consumed.

Types of Components

Different Types of Components are listed below:

• spring-cloud-aws: This component provides easy integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using this it is very convenient to interact with AWS services using well-known spring idioms/APIs.
• spring-cloud-bus: This component helps in linking services and service instances together with distributed messaging. During the propagation of state changes like config, the cloud bus is used widely.
• spring-cloud-cli: This is a plug and play option in the spring cloud that allows the developer to create an application in Groovy. This is used as a command-line interface for the spring cloud and using this enables the launch services to be seamless.
• spring-cloud-commons: Using this, features are delivered at two libraries. One of them is the Spring cloud context, which provides utilities and special services and the other is Spring cloud commons which provides a set of abstractions and common classes during implementations.
• spring-cloud-contract: This houses project holding solutions to seamlessly implement consumer-driven contracts approach. This component helps in simulating production and allows the developer to test real communication between services.
• spring-cloud-config: During external configuration, the spring cloud config provides server and client-side support in a distributed system. One of sub-component is spring-cloud-vault.
• spring-cloud-NetFlix: This enables the seamless integration of Netflix OSS (Operation support system). This OSS is exclusively written by Netflix to solve the distributed-system problem at a scalable level.
• spring-cloud-security: This component helps in developing a set of primitives to build safe applications with minimum bottlenecks. This component can be heavily configured as per the taste of the problem.
• spring-cloud-cloudfoundry: This enables the spring cloud to be easily run apps on Cloud Foundry, which is a PaaS feature. Cloudfoundry is a “middleware” to bind an app to a platform.
• spring-cloud-consul: This enables Consul, Consul is a service networking solution.
• spring-cloud-sleuth: This component eases the implementation of distributed tracing solutions and should be invisible to the users mostly.
• spring-cloud-stream: This enables in developing highly scalable event-driven microservices.
• spring-cloud-zookeeper: This allows developers to quickly enable and configure common patterns in applications.
• spring-cloud-task: This helps in developing short-lived microservices that are typically run locally.
• spring-cloud-gateway: This optimizes and builds a simple yet effective way of routing APIs keeping in mind to provide cross-cutting concerns.
• spring-cloud-openfeign: This component helps in the integration of spring boot apps by using autoconfiguration and binding to the spring environment.
• spring-cloud-function: This enables the developer to abstract all transport details and infrastructure and thus enabling them to focus on the business logic.

Why Spring Cloud is Required?

Developing microservices is not restricted to Spring cloud, but Spring Boot, but there are a few shortcomings of spring boot that leads to wide usage of Spring cloud for microservices development.

1. Distributed System Complexity

Spring Boot allows the developer to build standalone Java applications and has an embedded tomcat server. This method of using spring boot doesn’t take into account the problems of the distributed systems like issues with network/bandwidth, security issues, latency, etc. Spring Cloud comes in handy when it comes to the distributed system.

2. Special Tools

There are special tools in the spring cloud that enhance the functionality of it and improvises on processes and services in a cluster can find and talk to one another. This is achieved by maintaining a directory of services, registering services once a new one is built, and using various methodologies able to connect and talk to each other services.

3. Redundancy

In distributed systems, there are redundancy issues in distributed systems. Redundancy is a method to allow duplicate systems in our system. But duplicate issues are the ones when the redundant node is out of sync.

4. Load-balancing and Performance Improvement

In a distribution system, workload distribution across various resources in the system helps in the improvement of the entire network. This methodology is known as load-balancing. And with improvisation on operational overheads spring cloud caters to improving performance.

5. Complexity in Deployment

Spring cloud assists in handling complexity in deployment because of complexity in distributed systems.

Conclusion – Spring Cloud Components

In conclusion, as we start to decompose the monolith using a distributed system, there are a lot of complexities involved with distributed systems leading to poor quality of service from distributed systems or may disappear altogether. Thus, to enjoy different advantages of microservices, we lean on the Spring cloud and build what is called self-healing distributed systems. The goal of the spring cloud is to provide a wide variety of cloud independent services by various methodologies like acting as a wrapper for other implementation stacks.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Spring Cloud Components. Here we discuss what is spring cloud components along with the different types of components and Why spring cloud is required. You may also look at the following article to learn more –

1. Spring Cloud vs Spring Boot
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3. What is Spring Boot?
4. Spring Architecture