Dubbo Feels Increasingly Disconnected from the Spring Boot / Spring Cloud Ecosystem

[lilaizhencn]

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Apache Dubbo Component

Java Integration Cases (apache/dubbo-integration-cases)

Details

As a long-time Java microservice developer, I want to share some honest feedback about the current state of Dubbo and the surrounding ecosystem.

Many teams around me — including my own company — have gradually moved away from Dubbo in recent years.

The biggest problem is not RPC capability itself. Dubbo is technically powerful. The real issue is ecosystem consistency and maintenance rhythm.

Compared with the Spring Boot / Spring Cloud ecosystem, Dubbo often feels disconnected:

• Spring Boot upgrades arrive, but Dubbo adaptation is delayed
• Spring Cloud Alibaba versions become fragmented
• Dependency compatibility is difficult to manage
• Maven dependency trees become extremely complicated
• Different modules evolve at different speeds
• BOM and version alignment are not unified enough
• Jakarta / Boot 3 migration took too long for many production teams

In many real-world projects, developers spend too much time resolving:

• dependency conflicts
• incompatible starter versions
• transitive dependency issues
• serialization/version mismatches
• registry/client incompatibilities

instead of focusing on business development.

Another concern is community participation and release coordination.

Many developers feel that:

• issue responses are slow
• ecosystem modules are maintained inconsistently
• release cadence does not follow Spring closely enough
• some integrations appear under-maintained

As a result, many teams are now choosing:

• pure Spring Cloud
• gRPC
• lightweight HTTP-based microservices

not because Dubbo lacks features, but because operational and maintenance complexity has become too high.

I hope the community can consider:

• stronger unified BOM/version governance
• faster Spring ecosystem adaptation
• clearer compatibility matrices
• reduced module fragmentation
• better long-term maintenance coordination across Dubbo + Spring Cloud Alibaba ecosystem

Dubbo is still an excellent RPC framework technically.

But ecosystem experience and developer confidence are now becoming more important than raw RPC performance.

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