Alternatives to the Native Netflix EurekaClient

You need not use the raw Netflix EurekaClient. Also, it is usually more convenient to use it behind a wrapper of some sort. Spring Cloud has support for Feign (a REST client builder) and Spring RestTemplate through the logical Eureka service identifiers (VIPs) instead of physical URLs. To configure Ribbon with a fixed list of physical servers, you can set <client>.ribbon.listOfServers to a comma-separated list of physical addresses (or hostnames), where <client> is the ID of the client.

You can also use the org.springframework.cloud.client.discovery.DiscoveryClient, which provides a simple API (not specific to Netflix) for discovery clients, as shown in the following example:

@Autowired
private DiscoveryClient discoveryClient;

public String serviceUrl() {
    List<ServiceInstance> list = discoveryClient.getInstances("STORES");
    if (list != null && list.size() > 0 ) {
        return list.get(0).getUri();
    }
    return null;
}