Cloud Native is a style of application development that encourages easy adoption of best practices in the areas of continuous delivery and value-driven development. A related discipline is that of building 12-factor Apps in which development practices are aligned with delivery and operations goals, for instance by using declarative programming and management and monitoring. Spring Cloud facilitates these styles of development in a number of specific ways and the starting point is a set of features that all components in a distributed system either need or need easy access to when required.

Many of those features are covered by Spring Boot, which we build on in Spring Cloud. Some more are delivered by Spring Cloud as two libraries: Spring Cloud Context and Spring Cloud Commons. Spring Cloud Context provides utilities and special services for the ApplicationContext of a Spring Cloud application (bootstrap context, encryption, refresh scope and environment endpoints). Spring Cloud Commons is a set of abstractions and common classes used in different Spring Cloud implementations (eg. Spring Cloud Netflix vs. Spring Cloud Consul).