Miscellaneous projects

It is worth mentioning two other projects, which are now in the incubation stage. All such projects are available in the GitHub repository, https://github.com/spring-cloud-incubator. Some of them will probably be officially attached to the Spring Cloud package in the short term. The first of them is Spring Cloud Kubernetes, which provides integration with this very popular tool. We could talk about it for a long time, but let's try to introduce it in a few words. It is a system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications originally designed by Google. It is used for container orchestration and has many interesting features including service discovery, configuration management, and load balancing. In some cases, it might be treated as Spring Cloud's competition. The configuration is provided with the usage of YAML files.

Important features from the Spring Cloud point of view are service discovery and distributed configuration mechanisms, which are available on the Kubernetes platform. To use them in your application you should include spring-cloud-starter-kubernetes starter. 

The second interesting project at the incubation stage is Spring Cloud Etcd. Exactly the same as before, its main features are distributed configuration, service registration, and discovery. Etcd is not a powerful tool like Kubernetes. It just provides a distributed key-value store with a reliable way to store data in a clustered environment. And a little trivia—Etcd is the backend for service discovery, cluster state, and configuration management in Kubernetes.