Spring Cloud is a set of tools designed to facilitate the development of distributed systems and microservices in Java. It builds on top of the Spring framework and Spring Boot, providing features that help manage the complexities of microservices architecture, such as service registration, discovery, configuration management, and circuit breakers.

One of the key components of Spring Cloud is its ability to enable service registration and discovery, which allows microservices to find and communicate with each other dynamically. This is often achieved using tools like Eureka, which acts as a service registry, allowing services to register themselves and discover other services in the ecosystem ¹².

Additionally, Spring Cloud offers various features that enhance resilience and fault tolerance in microservices, such as circuit breakers (e.g., Hystrix) that help manage service failures gracefully ⁴. Overall, Spring Cloud simplifies the development and deployment of microservices, making it easier for developers to build scalable and maintainable applications.