Will Spring Cloud or Dubbo Disappear? A Deep Dive into Their Future

On Zhihu I saw the question “Which will become obsolete, Spring Cloud or Dubbo?” I decided to share my personal view.

Simple personal opinion

I believe both frameworks will likely exist for a long time.

Today the competition between them is no longer about replacement. With the emergence of Spring Cloud Alibaba, Dubbo has been smoothly integrated into the Spring Cloud ecosystem, allowing all surrounding products of Spring Cloud to work together seamlessly.

Dubbo’s seamless integration with Spring Cloud means two things:

If you are already a Dubbo user, you can now introduce Spring Cloud and easily combine Spring Cloud’s configuration center, registry, distributed tracing and other useful components to manage your distributed service cluster, enjoying the same ecosystem benefits as other Spring Cloud Netflix users.

If you are not a Dubbo user but find HTTP calls inefficient or costly, you can consider adopting Dubbo to improve RPC performance between services.

Some may argue they prefer the original Spring Cloud approach without Dubbo’s interface‑dependency model. That stance is valid; managing service contracts via HTTP avoids JAR‑level coupling and reduces compile‑time dependencies, which is a strong reason many avoid Dubbo.

However, I think the persistence of Spring Cloud users will not lead to Dubbo’s demise for two main reasons:

Dubbo already has a massive user base, and the integration solution makes migration more stable than a complete rewrite.

Dubbo has moved to the Apache Foundation, which applies strict criteria for long‑term maintenance. As long as no alternative surpasses it in all aspects, Dubbo is likely to remain viable for a long period.

Thus, there is no scenario where one framework must completely replace the other. In my view, they will continue to coexist as good partners, especially in domestic applications.