Deploy Spring Cloud Apps to Kubernetes with Alibaba Cloud EDAS – A Step‑by‑Step Guide

Prepare a Kubernetes Cluster

To run the application in the cloud you first need a Kubernetes cluster. The quickest way in EDAS is to import an Alibaba Cloud Container Service (ACK) cluster. If you don’t have an ACK cluster, you can either create one directly in the Container Service console or register an existing external cluster through the “Register Existing Cluster” option.

After the Kubernetes cluster is ready, import it into EDAS. The import process initializes EDAS controllers (OAM Controller, logging agents, monitoring components) in a managed control plane and maps the cluster to an EDAS namespace that represents a development, testing, or production environment.

Initialize the Cloud Application

Within EDAS, start the application creation wizard and select the imported cluster. In the runtime selection screen you will see four options: Custom , Java , Tomcat , and EDAS Container . Once a runtime is chosen it cannot be changed later.

Java/Tomcat/EDAS Container : EDAS packages the uploaded files with a base image to build the application image.

Custom : You provide your own Docker image that must follow Alibaba Cloud’s container image specifications. The essential Dockerfile lines are:

# Inherit the official EDAS image
FROM apaas/edas
# Download your artifact into /home/admin/app
ADD http://your.domain.com/file/location.jar /home/admin/app/

Note: EDAS runs the application as a Kubernetes Deployment managed by the OAM controller, and you can also convert existing Deployments into EDAS applications.

Deploy Directly from an IDE Plugin

After the application is initialized, you can use the Alibaba Cloud IDE plugin to package and deploy the app directly. The plugin offers deployment options that correspond to the selected runtime. For non‑custom images, the plugin uploads files three times faster than the console, making it ideal for large WAR/JAR packages.

For detailed steps on using the IDE plugin, refer to the Alibaba Cloud documentation “Use Cloud Toolkit to Quickly Deploy Applications to EDAS”.

Conclusion

From a developer’s perspective, this article shows how to deploy a Spring Cloud application to EDAS on Kubernetes, recommending direct WAR/JAR uploads via the IDE plugin as the fastest method. Future articles will cover operational tools in EDAS for building automated deployment pipelines.