VMware's Adib Saikali and Microsoft's Asir Selvasingh co-wrote this blog post.
In today’s digital landscape, organizations strive to keep pace with evolving business needs and ever-increasing customer expectations. Modernizing and migrating existing on-premises applications to the cloud are at the heart of this transformative journey.
As part of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, Azure Spring Apps has been instrumental in propelling this transformation, with many enterprise companies adopting the service for their mission-critical enterprise Java Spring applications. The compelling reason to modernize or migrate is not merely about cost savings or about staying current; it’s also about infusing your applications with the power of innovation and leveraging new capabilities to drive more value and enhance business efficiency.
Challenges with application cloud migrations
Before we jump to recommendations, let’s look at the key challenges with application cloud migrations among IT professionals and developers.
- Cost optimization remains a top concern in cloud adoption, according to Flexera's 2023 State of the Cloud Report. The focus on cost efficiency and the "delivery speed of new products/services" form the key “metrics for measuring progress in the cloud” for end customers.
- Difficulty getting started is a significant challenge, with 49% of respondents struggling to understand application dependencies during cloud migration, according to the same Flexera report. Teams familiar with on-premises systems struggle to understand the new and complex cloud native patterns. The challenge compounds due to unknown application dependencies, an issue caused by evolving team structures and knowledge gaps.
- Building and migrating applications to the cloud presents industry-wide complexities, as software engineering teams are required to spend unnecessary time and effort to handle frictions during cloud migration, as outlined in Microsoft’s 2021 Spring Report.
Today, Microsoft is revealing updates to Azure Spring Apps Enterprise that are designed to address these challenges, accelerate cloud migration, and modernize enterprise-grade applications.
Reduce total cost of ownership
Choosing a platform as a service (PaaS) over setting up virtual machines or containers can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). Not only can customers save direct costs due to the economies of scale that PaaS providers achieve, but they also can avoid the hidden costs of managing and maintaining their own platforms. This includes time, which represents a lost opportunity to focus on core business needs. Some who manage their own platforms often overlook the efficiency of their virtual machine utilization, especially when it isn’t tracked. By opting for PaaS, businesses can minimize these TCO elements and direct their resources to more strategic endeavors. Read Microsoft’s blog post to learn more about how Azure Spring Apps Enterprise Tier customers can see additional cost savings.
Azure Migrate streamlines Spring app migration and modernization
Microsoft has crafted a simple yet robust way to migrate and modernize with Azure Migrate, with a goal of making your cloud journey swift and smooth. By mid-September, Azure Migrate will include support for Spring applications, equipped to handle the discovery and assessment of numerous Spring applications in little time. Imagine this: Instead of days and weeks, you could spend merely 10–15 minutes for the assessment of 100 Spring applications. That is speed. That is efficiency.
As you look to migrate or modernize, Azure Migrate stands as your cloud companion, enabling you to be informed during the process. Knowing the status of your on-premises Spring applications, gauging cloud readiness, spotting potential issues, and estimating costs become second nature with Azure Migrate. It goes deeper, providing insights into Java and Spring versions, runtime specifics, and even initial cloud deployment costs. Most importantly, it guides you on each application’s readiness for the cloud transition.
While Azure Migrate does the heavy lifting, your path to the cloud can become clearer, more strategic, and more actionable.
Landing Zone Accelerator enables secure, repeatable, scalable cloud deployment
To enable the scalability and quality of your cloud journey, Microsoft introduces the Landing Zone Accelerator, specifically designed for Spring applications. This accelerator enables you to establish secure and scalable development, test, or production environments in as little as 15–30 minutes. Adhering to Azure’s best practices and embedding security by default, the Landing Zone Accelerator helps you achieve a cloud transition that is not only swift but also robust and scalable. It paves the way for both application and platform teams to thrive in the cloud environment.
The Landing Zone Accelerator for Azure Spring Apps represents an authoritative, prescriptive infrastructure-as-code solution, designed to assist enterprise customers in establishing a robust environment for deploying Spring and polyglot apps. It not only can expedite the deployment process but also can provide a comprehensive design framework, allowing for the clear planning and designing of Azure environments based on established standards. Read Microsoft's blog post to see how customers are already using Landing Zone Accelerator to streamline Spring app deployment.
For application teams, the Landing Zone Accelerator offers a significant head start by bundling together the most-used backing services, which teams can select as part of their deployment process. At the same time, platform teams benefit from an array of resources designed to maintain security and operational efficiency.
Microsoft delivers faster, better Spring application cloud migrations
Through a strategic collaboration since 2016, Microsoft and the Spring team have been central to enabling Spring applications to harness the full potential of the cloud. Enterprise customers form a substantial part of Azure’s user base, and a sizable portion of their workload is Java. Furthermore, among Java developers, two out of three are Spring developers actively deploying to production environments, according to a recent State of Spring report by VMware. Spring developers have voiced their desire to focus on their application code and business logic, rather than dealing with the complexities of managing, securing, and scaling infrastructure, containers, and virtual machines. Responding to this need, Microsoft collaborated with VMware to establish Azure Spring Apps, an initiative aimed at simplifying your development and operations workflows, accelerating your journey from code to production.
Azure Spring Apps Enterprise Tier further expedites the development and deployment of enterprise applications. This offering provides commercially supported Spring runtime components and access to Spring experts. Building on the features available in the Standard tier, it allows users to harness the expansive Azure ecosystem to enhance their Spring applications, facilitating a faster path to production and enabling the full realization of Spring's capabilities. The additions announced today aim to address the key pain points of getting-started difficulties, technical complexity, and cost optimization associated with cloud migration.
Experience Azure Spring Apps Enterprise today
Azure Spring Apps Enterprise Tier delivers simplicity and productivity, and you can leverage Spring experts to make your projects even more successful. You can easily deploy your Spring and polyglot applications to the cloud and get them up and running in no time. It is a golden path to production that can simplify the deployment process and optimize your resource usage.
And the best part? Microsoft is offering free monthly grants on all tiers—50 vCPU hours and 100 GB hours per tier. This is the number of free hours you get before any usage is billed, giving you a chance to test out the service.
Read Microsoft's announcement for more details about how to take advantage of its free monthly grants and leverage enterprise best practices with Landing Zone Accelerator for Azure Spring Apps. Read all of the announcements VMware made at SpringOne 2023.
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