The RestTemplate bean will be intercepted and auto-configured by Spring Cloud (due to the @LoadBalanced annotation) to use a custom HttpRequestClient that uses Netflix Ribbon to do the microservice lookup. Ribbon is also a load balancer, so if you have multiple instances of a service available, it picks one for you. (Neither Eureka nor Consul on their own performs load balancing, so we use Ribbon to do it instead.)
From the Brixton Release Train (Spring Cloud 1.1.0.RELEASE), the RestTemplate is no longer created automatically. Previously it was created for you, which caused confusion and potential conflicts.
The loadBalancer takes the logical service name (as registered with the discovery server) and converts it ...
