what is spring cloud ?

Spring Cloud builds on Spring Boot by providing a bunch of libraries that enhance the behaviour of an application when added to the classpath. You can take advantage of the basic default behaviour to get started really quickly, and then when you need to, you can configure or extend to create a custom solution.

why use spring cloud ?

Spring Cloud provides tools for developers to quickly build some of the common patterns in distributed systems (e.g. configuration management, service discovery, circuit breakers, intelligent routing, micro-proxy, control bus, one-time tokens, global locks, leadership election, distributed sessions, cluster state). Coordination of distributed systems leads to boiler plate patterns, and using Spring Cloud developers can quickly stand up services and applications that implement those patterns. They will work well in any distributed environment, including the developer's own laptop, bare metal data centres, and managed platforms such as Cloud Foundry.