Spring Cloud continues to evolve and add interesting new features. Support for binding to Kafka Streams, for example, in the spring-cloud-streams project makes it relatively easy to build message driven applications with connectors for Kafka and RabbitMQ. The teams we have using it appreciate the simplicity it brings to using sometimes complex infrastructure, such as ZooKeeper, and support for common problems that we need to address when building distributed systems, tracing with the spring-cloud-sleuth for example. The usual caveats apply but we're successfully using it on multiple projects.
Teams building systems composed of microservices need to think about coordination techniques such as service discovery, load balancing, circuit breaking and health checking. Many of these techniques require teams to set up tooling, which is not always trivial. The Spring Cloud project provides tools for developers so they can use these coordination techniques in the familiar Spring environment. These tools support Consul, ZooKeeper and the Netflix OSS full stack, all tools that we like. Simply put, it makes it easy to do the right thing with these tool sets. Although our usual concerns with Spring still stand, namely that it hides too much of the complexity, you should consider Spring Cloud if you are in the ecosystem and need to solve these problems.
