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 Applications, 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. The starting point is a set of features to which all components in a distributed system need easy access.

Many of those features are covered by Spring Boot, on which Spring Cloud builds. Some more features 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 (such as Spring Cloud Netflix and Spring Cloud Consul).

If you get an exception due to "Illegal key size" and you use Sun’s JDK, you need to install the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files. See the following links for more information:

Extract the files into the JDK/jre/lib/security folder for whichever version of JRE/JDK x64/x86 you use.

	Note
	Spring Cloud is released under the non-restrictive Apache 2.0 license. If you would like to contribute to this section of the documentation or if you find an error, you can find the source code and issue trackers for the project at github.