Spring Cloud Alibaba Graduates: What the New Release Means for Your Projects

Spring Cloud Alibaba Graduation Highlights

Spring Cloud Alibaba officially graduated after a year of incubation, releasing its first post‑graduation version.

The project started on July 27, 2018, in the Spring Cloud incubator and released its first graduate version on August 1, 2019, marking a full year of development.

Small Anecdotes During Graduation

In late May, the Spring Cloud Alibaba team discussed graduation with the Spring Cloud team and planned to announce it with the Spring Cloud Hoxton release, but a change in project strategy required a repository migration, leading to an earlier graduation.

The Spring Cloud team wanted starter names to follow the alibaba-<X>-spring-cloud-starter pattern, while the incubator used spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-<X>; after many discussions the original naming was retained.

After the repository migration, community members opened issues questioning the move; Spring Cloud leader Spencer Gibb responded with explanations.

The graduation version was originally planned for June but was delayed to avoid unnecessary public speculation, resulting in many late‑night meetings across a 12‑hour time difference.

Official Article Interpretation

Integrating Spring Cloud Alibaba into the Spring Cloud Release Train brings several drawbacks:

Project maintainers cannot release independently, so they must wait for the next Spring Cloud Release Train to publish updates.

Maintainers lose direct access to key statistics such as GitHub metrics and download counts.

However, many collaborations are independent of the Release Train:

The Spring Cloud team participates in code reviews to improve integration.

Spring Cloud Alibaba starters are added to start.spring.io for easy selection.

The project is listed on the official Spring Cloud page ( https://spring.io/projects/spring-cloud-alibaba ) with important release and feature information.

Repository migration for developers means:

The migration does not change the development or maintenance model; both the Spring Cloud Alibaba and Spring Cloud teams continue to maintain the project.

GroupId and some artifactIds change, requiring code adjustments on the user side.

Users must explicitly specify dependency versions instead of inheriting them via the Spring Cloud BOM.

Release Notes of the Graduation Version

Greenwich supports Greenwich.SR2.

Finchley supports Finchley.SR4.

Sentinel updates to version 1.6.3 with several issue fixes and new modules (e.g., spring-cloud-alibaba-sentinel-gateway, spring-cloud-alibaba-starter-sentinel).

Nacos Discovery updates to version 1.1.1 with new configuration parameters and weight‑based routing rules.

Nacos Config updates to version 1.1.1 with bug fixes.

RocketMQ Binder adds support for MessageSource and PollableMessageSource.

Dubbo Spring Cloud updates to version 2.7.3 with various improvements.

Seata updates to version 0.7.1 with bug fixes.

Roadmap

Develop a Spring Cloud Admin console for service governance, configuration management, rate limiting, and project monitoring.

Reference the Spring Cloud Azure Playground to create a Spring Cloud Alibaba Playground with best‑practice demos, video tutorials, and auto‑generated projects.

Add best‑practice demo projects for each Spring Cloud Alibaba feature.

Replace OpenFeign & Ribbon with a more generic service‑call client.

Post‑Graduation User Code Modifications

Migration requires three main changes:

Package name adjustments.

Version number updates.

Re‑importing internal Spring Cloud Alibaba classes when necessary (most are covered by auto‑configuration).

Example Maven BOM and starter dependencies:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-alibaba-dependencies</artifactId>
    <version>0.9.0.RELEASE</version>
    <type>pom</type>
    <scope>import</scope>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-discovery</artifactId>
</dependency>

Graduation version dependencies:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-alibaba-dependencies</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.0.RELEASE</version>
    <type>pom</type>
    <scope>import</scope>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-discovery</artifactId>
</dependency>

Committer Mechanism

After moving to Alibaba’s own GitHub repository, contributors can become committers by meeting the following conditions:

Submit at least five substantial pull requests.

Participate in issue maintenance and important feature discussions.

Engage in code review.

Thanks to all contributors: @Rivers-Shall, @ly641921791, @JevonYang, @cdfive, @eacdy, @pyhblacksky, @george510257, @AbelSara, @slievrly, @pigxcloud, @lovepoem, @liudaomanbu, @lujian0571, @jsbxyyx, @pengzai170, @hero-zhanghao, @wzlee, @xingfudeshi.