Spring Boot and Spring Cloud are related but distinct frameworks within the broader Spring ecosystem. Here are the key differences between Spring Boot and Spring Cloud:
- Spring Boot:
- Spring Boot is a framework designed to simplify the development of standalone, production-ready Spring applications.
- It provides a convention-over-configuration approach, allowing developers to quickly set up and configure Spring applications with minimal boilerplate code.
- Spring Boot includes embedded servers, auto-configuration, and dependency management, making it easy to create self-contained, executable JAR files.
- It focuses on simplifying the development of individual Spring applications by reducing the manual configuration required.
- Spring Cloud:
- Spring Cloud is a set of tools and libraries built on top of Spring Boot, specifically designed for building distributed systems and microservices architectures.
- It provides additional features and abstractions for addressing common challenges in distributed systems, such as service discovery, load balancing, distributed configuration management, circuit breakers, and more.
- Spring Cloud leverages external components like Netflix OSS (Eureka, Ribbon, Hystrix, etc.) and integrates them into the Spring ecosystem.
- It promotes a “cloud-native” approach to building applications by offering solutions for distributed system patterns and configurations.
In summary, Spring Boot is focused on simplifying the development of standalone Spring applications, while Spring Cloud provides tools and libraries to address the challenges of building distributed systems and microservices architectures on top of Spring Boot. Spring Cloud builds on the capabilities provided by Spring Boot to enable developers to create cloud-native applications.