Azure Spring Apps Enterprise continues to make enterprise developers’ lives easier by adding features that streamline their path to production and improve the multi-cloud developer experience. A fully managed offering, Azure Spring Apps Enterprise is the culmination of several years of collaboration between VMware and Microsoft, and we continue to add features and capabilities that help developers build, deploy, and iterate on Azure natively. Inspired by the Spring ecosystem and VMware Tanzu Application Platform, the latest features include customizable app templates and lightweight observability at the app level.
Motivated by knowing that the quality of the developer experience (DevX) directly impacts business performance, improving that experience has become an aspiration for IT and business leaders alike. A survey of more than 600 IT, engineering, and line-of-business decision makers conducted by Forrester Consulting in March of 2022 on behalf of VMware reflects this trend, with 75 percent of respondents saying that developer experience is important to business execution and the ability to compete, and more than two-thirds saying a good developer experience results in a better experience for end users and customers.
With this understanding, we can see why it’s important to invest time, energy, and resources in creating a positive developer experience. While this can be a daunting task with cultural and organizational implications, there are some specific areas that can be improved through your technical capabilities. In the same Forrester Consulting study, when asked what capabilities would have a positive impact on developers’ experience, some of the highest ranking responses included deployment automation, application templates, and visibility into data-driven insights.
Build, deploy, iterate on Azure
Being able to jump-start your application development process quickly is the first step in a good developer experience. With the addition of Application Accelerators—reusable code and configuration templates—to Azure Spring Apps Enterprise, Spring developers can start building even more quickly. Based on the popular open source Spring Initializr project, Application Accelerators are customizable and can be created by cloud operations and platform engineering teams to be used by multiple app dev teams. Already a main feature of Tanzu Application Platform, with the Application Accelerators feature, developers can not only start writing code more quickly, they can do it in a more consistent, secure, and scalable way natively on Azure.
While App Accelerators help developers start building applications immediately, the Application Live View feature lets them identify and fix bugs in their code at the application layer. Application Live View is a lightweight, app-centric observability and debugging capability that helps developers more easily troubleshoot their cloud native applications by surfacing application metrics, logs, environment variables, requests, health checks, and more. Developers can quickly pinpoint and resolve bugs in their application code, ultimately decreasing the time it takes them to get their application to production.
The VMware Tanzu and Microsoft teams have been working together to deliver Azure Spring Apps. Previously introduced as Azure Spring Cloud, the Azure Spring Apps Enterprise tier is a fully managed offering. Today, Azure Spring Apps is being used by thousands of developers to build and run Java applications on Azure. In the coming months we plan to work together to deliver even more developer efficiency and help customers with new application patterns.
To learn more about Azure Spring Apps, read Microsoft's announcement. And join VMware and Microsoft at SpringOne Essentials, a free, two-day virtual event being held January 24 and 25, 2023. We’ll have technical demos and use cases to inspire you. If you want to get your hands on it before then, create an instance of Azure Spring Apps Enterprise and make use of our free 50 vCPU/100GB memory monthly grant program to try out these new features today.
