Chapter 7 introduced you to Spring Boot. You explored several examples built with Spring Boot, so now you have the foundation in place for an enterprise-level application. This chapter delves into the next essential component of Spring, known as Spring Cloud, which extends Spring Boot. There are a bunch of common patterns in distributed microservices ecosystems that can help you integrate the core services as a loosely coupled continuum, and Spring Cloud provides many powerful tools that enhance the behavior of Spring Boot applications to implement those patterns.