Spring Cloud Alibaba Features and Components Explained

Spring Cloud Alibaba is a powerful framework that makes it easy to build microservices-based applications. It provides a set of tools and libraries that simplify the development and deployment of cloud-native systems.

One of the key features of Spring Cloud Alibaba is its ability to provide a scalable and fault-tolerant architecture. This is achieved through the use of technologies such as Nacos and Sentinel.

Nacos is a service discovery and configuration management tool that helps to manage the configuration and discovery of microservices. It provides a centralized management platform for configuration and service registration.

Spring Cloud Alibaba also provides a built-in support for the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem, making it easy to integrate with other Alibaba Cloud services. This includes support for Alibaba Cloud's payment and messaging services.

Sentinel is a powerful tool for managing traffic and flow control in microservices-based applications. It provides a set of features such as circuit breakers, rate limiters, and load shedding to prevent cascading failures.

By using Spring Cloud Alibaba, developers can build robust and scalable applications with ease.

Getting started with Spring Cloud Alibaba is a breeze. The easiest way to get started is by including the Spring Cloud BOM and then adding spring-cloud-alibaba-dependencies to your application’s classpath.

To include the spring-cloud-alibaba-dependencies dependency in your pom.xml, you should add the Aliyun Spring Boot BOM to your pom.xml. This will give you access to all the features of Spring Cloud Alibaba.

If you want to use Spring Boot Starters for Alibaba Cloud services, you can add individual starters for the features you would like. This will help you customize your application to meet your specific needs.

Here is a summary of the dependencies you need to get started:

Spring Cloud Alibaba is a one-stop solution for microservices development, providing a comprehensive set of features for building distributed applications and services.

It includes the required components for developing distributed applications and services, allowing developers to develop distributed applications easily with the Spring Cloud programming models.

With Spring Cloud Alibaba, you can use the distributed solutions of Alibaba for your applications and build a distributed system of your own with Alibaba middleware.

Spring Cloud Alibaba features include flow control and service degradation, service registration and discovery, distributed configuration, RPC service, event-driven architecture, distributed transaction, and more.

You can start by including the Spring Cloud BOM and adding spring-cloud-alibaba-dependencies to your application's classpath.

If you want to use Spring Boot Starters for Alibaba Cloud services, you should add the Aliyun Spring Boot BOM to your pom.xml.

Here are some key features of Spring Cloud Alibaba:

By following these steps and using the features of Spring Cloud Alibaba, you can easily develop and deploy your own distributed applications and services.

Spring Cloud Alibaba is an open-source software that provides a one-stop solution for microservices development. It includes the required components for developing distributed applications and services.

The project offers a range of features, including flow control and service degradation, service registration and discovery, distributed configuration, and more.

Some of the key features of Spring Cloud Alibaba include:

Spring Cloud Alibaba also provides support for Alibaba Cloud Object Storage, which is a storage product on Alibaba Cloud that provides massive, secure, low-cost, and highly reliable cloud storage services.

Spring Cloud Alibaba is built on top of the native Spring Cloud, making its service governance capabilities considered Spring Cloud Plus. It fully covers the Spring Cloud native features, including distributed configuration, service registration and discovery, and load balancing.

One of the standout features of Spring Cloud Alibaba is its support for flow control and service degradation, which can be customized using annotations. This allows for dynamic changes to the rules.

Here's a comparison of the features of Spring Cloud and Dubbo Spring Cloud:

Spring Cloud Alibaba also includes components such as Sentinel for flow control and concurrency, Nacos for dynamic service discovery and configuration, and RocketMQ for distributed messaging and streaming.

In the world of Spring Cloud Alibaba, the foundation of its robust features lies in its carefully selected components. Each component is designed to tackle specific challenges, ensuring a seamless and efficient experience.

Sentinel is the heart of flow control, concurrency, circuit breaking, and load protection, safeguarding service stability.

Nacos is a dynamic service discovery, configuration, and management platform for building cloud-native applications.

RocketMQ is a distributed messaging and streaming platform with low latency, high performance, and reliability.

Seata is a distributed transaction solution with high performance and ease of use for microservices architecture.

Alibaba Cloud OSS provides secure and reliable cloud storage services for storing, processing, and accessing massive amounts of data.

Alibaba Cloud SMS offers a global messaging service, providing businesses with efficient and intelligent communication capabilities to quickly contact customers.

Alibaba Cloud SchedulerX provides accurate, reliable, and highly available scheduled job scheduling services with response times within seconds.

These components work together to create a powerful ecosystem for building and managing cloud-native applications.

In the realm of computer science, Spring Cloud Alibaba Cloud ACM is an implementation of the commercial product Application Configuration Management (ACM) in the client side of Spring Cloud, and it's free of charge.

Spring Cloud AliCloud ACM allows you to quickly access ACM configuration management capabilities based on Spring Cloud's programming model. This means you can leverage the power of ACM without any additional coding hassle.

Currently, EDAS supports direct deployment of the Nacos Config app, making it an even more convenient option for developers. This eliminates the need for manual configuration setup.

Using ACM on the Alibaba Cloud offers a better stability and saves you from tedious server maintenance work. The configuration process is similar to using a lightweight configuration center, but with some differences in configurations.

EDAS provides application hosting service and will fill in all configurations about ACM automatically for the hosted applications. This feature simplifies the deployment process and reduces the risk of human error.

Groups are used to organize configurations in various systems. The default group is DEFAULT_GROUP.

You can define your own custom group by adding a configuration property in the bootstrap.properties file. This configuration must be placed in the bootstrap.properties file.

The value of the Group must be the same as the value of the corresponding configuration property, such as spring.cloud.nacos.config.group or spring.cloud.alicloud.acm.group.

Here's a summary of the required configuration:

Remember to use the same value for the Group property as the corresponding configuration property. This ensures that your custom group is recognized by the system.

Namespaces are used to isolate configurations for different tenants in Nacos, allowing groups and Data IDs to be the same across different namespaces.

Typical scenarios for using namespaces include isolating configurations for different environments, such as development, testing, and production environments.

The “Public” namespace of Nacos is used if no namespace is specified in ${spring.cloud.nacos.config.namespace}.

You can also specify a custom namespace in the following way: the configuration must be in the bootstrap.properties file, and the value of spring.cloud.nacos.config.namespace is the id of the namespace, which can be retrieved from the Nacos console.

Do not select other namespaces when adding configurations, as this can prevent configurations from being retrieved properly.

Here's a summary of the steps to specify a custom namespace:

Registration and configuration are crucial components of Spring Cloud Alibaba. Nacos Discovery is a key component in microservices architecture, helping to register services to the Nacos server automatically and keeping track of services dynamically.

You can use Nacos Discovery by introducing the starter with the group ID as com.alibaba.cloud and the artifact ID as spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-discovery. The default value of server-mode is LOCAL, and you need to change it to EDAS to use the registration center on cloud.

The registration center on cloud saves you from tedious server maintenance while providing better stability. You can use the lightweight version for application development and local testing, and use EDAS for canary deployment or production.

Registration is a crucial step in microservices architecture. You can use Nacos Discovery to register your service to the Nacos server automatically. This helps keep track of services and refreshes the service list dynamically.

Nacos Discovery registers some of the metadata of the service instance, such as host, port, health check URL, and homepage to Nacos. You can find more information on how to download and start Nacos on the Nacos Website.

You can use the starter with the group ID as com.alibaba.cloud and the artifact ID as spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-discovery to introduce Nacos Discovery for service registration/discovery.

To use Nacos Discovery for service registration/discovery and call, you can integrate it with the Netflix Ribbon, RestTemplate, or OpenFeign.

Types of Registration Centers

There are two types of registration centers: lightweight configuration center and registration center on cloud, provided through EDAS.

You can use the registration center on cloud by changing the server-mode to EDAS in your configuration. You will also need to provide your AccessKey ID and Access Key Secret from your Alibaba Cloud account.

To register a service to Nacos, you need to configure the address of the registration center in your application.properties file. You also need to add the following address in application.properties.

```properties

spring.cloud.nacos.discovery=true

```

If you don't want to use Nacos for service registration and discovery, you can set spring.cloud.nacos.discovery to false.

You can see the registered services on the Nacos console after starting the Nacos server and configuring it properly.

Let's talk about provider properties.

To start a provider application, you need to configure your pom.xml file. This is a complete example of what your pom.xml file should look like.

If you want to use Nacos for service registration and discovery, you need to include some basic configurations in your application.properties file.

The name server of RocketMQ Server is 127.0.0.1:9876 by default.

You can enable message trace feature for all producers and consumers by setting accessKey to the AccessKey of your Alibaba Cloud Account.

The maximum allowed message size in bytes for RocketMQ producers is 8249344 bytes by default.

Here are some properties available for RocketMQ producers only:

Note that you can set spring.cloud.nacos.discovery to false if you don't want to use Nacos for service registration and discovery.