What is the purpose of using Spring cloud? What is the difference between AWS and Springcloud?

Question

Why we need Spring cloud? What is the difference between AWS and Spring Cloud?

Answer 1

It might help to think of a division between infrastructure, applications and platform. Think of infrastructure as hardware - servers, disk, compute, network routing etc. that you can use. Let's call 'application' the executables that you build from your code in order to implement business logic and satisfy your end users. Then platform is a connecting layer - tools and standards to help your applications make use of infrastructure.

AWS is most famous for providing cloud infrastructure but it also provides a lot of services that could fall under platform. For example, it provides an API gateway service and container orchestration services with ECS or EKS (kubernetes) - these are more platform-level services as they are services that help your applications to scale and to talk to each other in the cloud.

Spring Cloud is a set of tools that help you address common problems faced by cloud applications. Concerns like how to get applications to talk reliably to each other in the cloud (eureka, hystrix and ribbon for http, streams for messaging) how to provide a single entry-point for consumers to access a set of microservices (zuul and spring cloud gateway) and how to manage configuration across microservices (spring cloud config). Mostly I would put these concerns under 'platform' but there are grey areas. You normally add the spring cloud libraries to components you build, which is a bit more 'application'-like. Some of the same concerns are addressed by certain services available in AWS (especially ECS and EKS(kubernetes)).

So the core areas of concern are very different for AWS (primarily infrastructure) and spring cloud (platform or platform-application bridge). But there can be some overlap at the platform level because AWS and spring cloud both offer so many options. It is tricky to find any direct comparisons because there are so many options but if you focus on EKS(kubernetes) in particular a good article comparing it with spring cloud is https://dzone.com/articles/deploying-microservices-spring-cloud-vs-kubernetes