The big advantage of Spring Cloud is that it supports all the patterns and mechanisms we have looked at. These are also stable implementations, unlike some other frameworks. I'll describe in detail which of the patterns are supported by which Spring Cloud project in Chapter 3, Spring Cloud Overview.
In this chapter, we have discussed the most important concepts related to microservices architecture, such as cloud-native development, service discovery, distributed configuration, API gateways, and the circuit breaker pattern. I have attempted to present my point of view about the advantages and drawbacks of this approach in the development of enterprise applications. Then, I described the main patterns and solutions related to microservices. Some of these are well-known patterns that have been around for years and are treated as something new in the IT world. In this summary, I would like to turn your attention to some things. Microservices are cloud-native by their nature. Frameworks such as Spring Boot and Spring Cloud help you to accelerate your cloud-native development. The main motivation of migrating to cloud-native development is the ability to implement and deliver applications faster while maintaining high quality. In many cases, microservices help us to achieve this, but sometimes the monolithic approach is not a bad choice.
Although microservices are small and independent units, they are managed centrally. Information such as network location, configuration, logging files, and metrics should be stored in one central place. There are various types of tools and solutions that provide all these features. We will talk about them in detail in almost all of the chapters in this book. The Spring Cloud project is designed to help us in integrating with all that stuff. I hope to efficiently guide you through the most important integrations it offers.
