Can one setup Spring Boot 2.6 and Spring Cloud 2021.x to use Ribbon and Hystrix with Spring WebClient and Feign?

I know that Spring Cloud at some version (3.0?) dropped direct support for some Netflix libraries like Ribbon or Hystrix. Now I'm trying to make a smooth migration of around 20 microservices running on production having some custom code extending Ribbon (and Hystrix to a lesser degree). The main goal is to upgrade from Spring Boot 2.3 to 2.6. As a consequence I need to upgrade Spring Cloud to 3.1.x, right?

My guess was to proceed with 2-step upgrade to avoid a one big-step migration:

1. Upgrade to Spring Boot 2.6 and Spring Cloud 3.1 while still using Ribbon and Hystrix
2. Make a way through a jungle of an old code and getting rid of Ribbon and Hystrix in smaller increments.

However to achieve this I'm trying to use simultanously Spring Boot 2.6, Spring Cloud with release train 2021.01 and 2 selected starters from older Spring Cloud (latest versions of these artifacts):

• spring-cloud-starter-netflix-hystrix 2.2.10.RELEASE
• spring-cloud-starter-netflix-ribbon 2.2.10.RELEASE

Is this possible at all? We are heavilly using Feign and Spring WebClient - client-side load-balancing must work for these. So far I found out Feign clients are not automatically integrated with Ribbon.

@spencergibb @OlgaMaciaszek - especially counting on you.

Answering my own question after receiving confirmation from Spring Cloud team by other means: this is a bad idea to try use Ribbon with Spring Cloud 2021.01 and it would require a really hard work to make it working.

So short answer is: "no".