Spring Cloud Alibaba and Nacos Service Governance: Architecture, Installation, and Practical Usage

Spring Cloud Alibaba Overview

The article begins by describing three deployment models—monolithic, distributed, and cluster—and explains how each model addresses scalability and fault tolerance.

System Architecture Evolution

It outlines the progression from monolithic applications to vertical applications, layered architecture, SOA, and finally microservices, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each style.

Microservice Architecture Introduction

Microservices are defined as independently runnable services derived from further splitting a monolithic application, emphasizing independent deployment and clear task boundaries.

Spring Cloud Introduction

Spring Cloud is presented as a collection of frameworks that simplify distributed system development, offering features such as service discovery, configuration management, message bus, load balancing, circuit breaking, and monitoring.

Service Governance with Nacos

The article defines service governance as the core module of microservice architecture that enables automatic registration and discovery of services.

It lists common service registries (Zookeeper, Eureka, Consul, Nacos) and focuses on Nacos, describing its core functions: service registration, heartbeat, synchronization, discovery, and health checks.

Nacos Practical Guide

Installation : Download the zip package from the official GitHub releases page and unzip it (the example uses Nacos Server version 1.3.2).

Start Nacos :

# 进入bin目录
cd bin
#在cmd中启动
startup.cmd -m standalone

Access the dashboard at http://localhost:8848/nacos (default credentials: nacos/nacos).

Integrate Nacos into a Spring Boot project :

<!--nacos客户端-->
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-discovery</artifactId>
</dependency>

Add the @EnableDiscoveryClient annotation to the main application class:

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableDiscoveryClient
public class ProductServer {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(ProductServer.class, args);
    }
}

Configure the Nacos address in application.yml :

spring:
  cloud:
    nacos:
      discovery:
        server-addr: localhost:8848

Remote Call Load Balancing with Ribbon

The article explains client‑side load balancing, where the caller decides which service instance to use, and introduces Ribbon as the typical solution in Spring Cloud.

Overall, the guide provides a comprehensive walkthrough from architectural concepts to concrete implementation steps for building cloud‑native microservices with Spring Cloud Alibaba and Nacos.