Everyone wants their developers to be more productive. Increased productivity means more features and functionality, which leads to more satisfied customers and better business outcomes. That is why, today at SpringOne, we are happy to announce the general availability of Microsoft Azure Spring Cloud—a fully managed service for Spring Boot apps. As a native Azure service, it is operated by Microsoft, but VMware has partnered closely with Microsoft in the development of the service and fully supports Microsoft in its operation of Azure Spring Cloud.
Over the years, Spring has continued to evolve and add more functionality to make the development of microservices, batch processing, reactive applications, and event-driven applications simpler for developers. By most counts, Spring continues to be the leading Java Runtime platform; a recent survey done by Snyk puts Spring adoption at 60 percent.
Today’s developers build their Spring applications in the morning, test with an on-premise Kubernetes cluster in the afternoon, and are operational on a public cloud before the end of the day. The complexity involved, however, is significant. Simplifying this workflow is a key objective for us on the Spring team inside of VMware.
Since the launch of the private preview last year, Microsoft and VMware have been working closely on Azure Spring Cloud to enable you to run your most critical Spring apps in production, at scale, with confidence. Azure Spring Cloud removes the burden and related challenges of setting up and managing Spring Cloud infrastructure. It combines several popular components to deliver a production-ready environment for Spring microservices, including:
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Spring Cloud – Provides tools and frameworks to make it easy to run Spring Boot apps in the cloud with features including a service registry, client-side load balancing, and circuit breakers. Azure Spring Cloud manages these components on behalf of the developer; simple configuration details are all that need to be provided.
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kpack – An open source Kubernetes-native build service that automates the creation and updating of container images on Kubernetes using Cloud Native Buildpacks. kpack lies at the heart of the Tanzu Build Service.
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Azure Kubernetes Service – A fully managed Kubernetes offering from Microsoft.
While kpack and Azure Kubernetes Service are not exposed to users, organizations can rest assured that proven open source technologies are underpinning their most important apps—and that Microsoft and VMware will provide enterprise-level support.
Accelerate your path to production
Azure Spring Cloud makes it easy to get your Java apps into production. As a managed service, the administrative work of setting up and managing Spring Cloud infrastructure is taken care of for you. Just deploy your source code or artifacts and Azure Spring Cloud will do the rest, including service discovery, configuration management, and distributed tracing. Running atop Azure Kubernetes Service, scaling the service is easy, and it is available in 10 regions across four continents.
Build and deploy powerful apps
Azure Spring Cloud easily enables your apps to interact with popular Azure services, such as Azure Active Directory and Cosmos DB. Microsoft provides Spring Starters for these and many other services that you can include in your apps to help automate configuration. And these starters aren’t limited to Azure Spring Cloud. You can use them with any Spring Boot app deployed on Azure. This is the power of Spring Boot.
Azure Spring Cloud supports blue/green deployments, so you can immediately fall back to a previous version when necessary. You can also automate your CI/CD pipelines through the integration with the DevOps tools of your choice, including Azure DevOps and Jenkins.
Simplify Day 2 operations
You’ve built your apps and deployed them to Azure Spring Cloud. Now what? Because Azure Spring Cloud is fully managed, all patching of and updates to the underlying infrastructure are handled for you, by Microsoft. That takes a huge operational burden off the table.
Identifying performance issues is made easy using Azure Monitor, which provides you with a great visual interface to easily trace interactions between services and identify poorly performing services and bottlenecks. You can also use the collected metrics to set up alerts.
Need to scale? Not a problem. Azure Spring Cloud allows you to autoscale based on demand. Currently in preview, this feature allows you to set predefined schedules and limits for scaling out in the infrastructure supporting your apps as well as app instances. Learn more about autoscaling here.
And there’s more. Check out today’s announcement from Microsoft for more details.
Start using Azure Spring Cloud in production today
Azure Spring Cloud is easy to get started with, and you can do it for free. There are a lot of great resources available to help, including this quickstart for deploying Spring Apps to Azure Spring Cloud.
