Spring Cloud Security

This module is like an extension from Spring Security. However, distributed systems have different requirements for security. Normally, they have central identity management, or the authentication lies with the clients in the case of REST APIs. Normally, in distributed systems, we have microservices, and these services might have more than one instance in the runtime environment whose characteristics make the authentication module slightly different from monolithic applications. The module can be used together with Spring Boot applications and makes the OAuth2 implementation very easy with a couple of annotations and a few configurations. Also, some common patterns are supported, such as single sign-on, token relay, and token exchange.

For the microservice applications based on the Spring Cloud Netflix, it is particularly interesting because it enables downstream authentication to work with a Zuul proxy and offers support from Feign clients. An interceptor is used to fetch tokens.