Why is Spring Cloud called "Cloud"?

Question

Spring Cloud is a framework that helps implementing a Microservices architecture (with common patterns and practices, like Runtime Configuration, Tracing, Circuit Breaker, Service Discovery, and so on), but it has nothing to do with "Cloud", right?

Microservices and Cloud are a good match when combined, but Spring Cloud helps with microservices, not with cloud. Am I right?

My question is: wouldn't Spring Microservices be a better name for Spring Cloud?

I don't want to change its name, I just want to be sure that I understand the framework correctly.

For the record, "Spring Cloud Netflix" or "Spring Cloud Amazon" would be well named, because they do help with the integration of those specific Cloud platforms.

Answer 1

Well, probably people from Pivotal responsible for naming can give you the good answer, I can only speculate.

In my understanding, Spring Cloud is set of tools that allow (mainly spring boot driven) application to be written in "Cloud Native" way. When you run in the cloud, it makes sense to protect the application with Circuit breaker, to use service discovery in a way that scaling out the various parts of the system will work seamlessly, and so on and forth.

Now, spring boot application don't necessarily run in the cloud, in fact its possible to run spring boot app on your "personal" (on-premise) server.

Spring boot applications are not restricted to run microservices as well, its possible to run monoliths with spring boot as well. In fact there are many monolith application that use spring under the hood.

Now, can you take tools from spring cloud and use them for applications not running in the cloud? Yes of course you can. Can you benefit from these tools? Probably yes, but not so much if you run one microservice on one on-premise server (I'm exaggerating but still).

Probably (again a speculation) it will be correct to say that the more your environment "resembles" the cloud (public cloud, private or hybrid) - the more benefits you'll see from using these tools. Hence the name :)