Spring Cloud makes it easy to add Cloud-native features to your microservices. In this chapter, we looked at some of the important patterns in developing Cloud-native applications and implemented them using various Spring Cloud projects.

We learned about managing microservices configuration with Spring Cloud Config, how to connect microservices and propagate configuration changes to all microservices using Spring Cloud Bus, and how to implement client-side load balancing with Ribbon. Then, we implemented location transparency with Eureka, an API gateway using Zuul, and used Spring Cloud Sleuth and Zipkin to implement distributed tracing. Finally, we implemented fault tolerance using Hystrix.

It is important to remember that the field of developing Cloud-native applications is still in its inception phase—in its first few years. It needs more time to mature. Expect some evolution in patterns and frameworks in the years to come.

In the next chapter, we'll shift our attention to one of the evolving programming techniques—Reactive programming.