A service registry works like a phone book for the Cloud, which makes it possible to find out where the services are and how many instances of them are available for handling incoming requests.

Spring offers support for most of the common service registries, including the following:

• Zookeeper
• Consul
• Netflix Eureka

Using a service registry offers the following benefits:

• Sophisticated load balancing, such as availability zone awareness
• Client-side load balancing
• Request routing