Spring Cloud is a set of tools and frameworks designed to help developers build and manage distributed systems and microservices. It provides features like configuration management, service discovery, circuit breakers, and routing, making it easier to create resilient applications that can scale effectively. By integrating with other Spring projects, Spring Cloud simplifies the development process for cloud-native applications. It supports various cloud platforms, allowing developers to deploy their services seamlessly while ensuring they can handle challenges like load balancing and fault tolerance in a microservices architecture.