As we have already discussed, the microservice architecture allows us to divide a large system into a number of collaborating components. As you know, the Spring Framework provides loosely coupled components at the component level; similarly, the microservice with Spring Boot provides loosely coupled processes at the process level.

Here we are dividing a monolithic application into smaller microservices, and deploying each service as a single responsibility within a bounded context.

By using the auto-configuration behavior of Spring Boot, we can easily create several microservices. Spring Boot provides Starters that we can add to the microservice application and deploy with the embedded containers.

Spring Cloud extends Spring Boot into the realm of cloud-native microservices, making the development of distributed microservices quite practical. Spring Boot's real power is in creating microservice-based applications. Spring Boot also supports distributed configurations for cloud-native applications.

Let's see where to use different configuration files for the Spring Boot and Spring Cloud applications.