Minimalist Spring Cloud in Practice

Minimalist Spring Cloud in Practice is an introductory and practical guide to microservices written by Hu Jinhan based on years of server-side architecture practice. Published by China Machine Press in 2019, it runs about 181,000 characters over 208 pages, divided into three parts and 15 chapters. Part One, "Basic Services" (Chapters 1–11), forms the bulk of the book. It begins with the evolution of server-side architecture, compares Spring Cloud with Dubbo, and outlines the role of each Spring Cloud subproject, then works through the components one by one: the registry Eureka, the configuration center Config, client-side load balancing with Ribbon, the declarative REST client Feign, the circuit breaker Hystrix and its dashboard, the routing gateway Zuul, the next-generation gateway Gateway, call-chain tracing with Sleuth and Zipkin, secret management with Vault, and common subprojects such as Spring Boot CLI, ZooKeeper, and Consul. Each component starts with a minimal working example, then moves on to advanced scenarios such as configuration classes, configuration files, and custom implementations. Part Two, "Tasks and Messaging" (Chapters 12–14), turns to asynchronous and batch processing, covering message-driven Spring Cloud Stream, the message bus Bus, and batch processing Task, explaining how Binder and Spring Integration are wired in and their common configurations. Part Three, "Microservices in Practice" (Chapter 15), closes with a complete small project built on Spring Cloud, Docker, and OAuth2, walking through core component integration, writing a Dockerfile, and startup and API testing, with an appendix summarizing the book's configurations. The overall approach is "compact and sufficient" rather than exhaustive, helping readers quickly stand up a microservice skeleton that actually runs.