Recently Microsoft and VMware both announced the general availability of Azure Spring Cloud, a fully-managed service for Spring Boot apps. The service allows enterprises to deploy JARs or code to it, and the service automates the process of wiring the apps to the Spring service runtime.
Last year Microsoft introduced Azure Spring Service as a joint effort between them and VMware, with both organisations supporting and operating the service. Since then, Java developers in various organizations have used the service and provided feedback to further shape the service, which has resulted in features that:
- Strengthen security such as secret management, hybrid deployments, control ingress and egress to apps, and secure communications using TLS/SSL,
- Support performance and reliability such as autoscaling, log streaming, alerts, and self-diagnostics.
Now Azure Spring Cloud is generally available with two new features available in preview:
- The first being Managed Virtual Network, which allows users to be in control of inbound and outbound network communications for Azure Spring Cloud and enables Azure Spring Cloud to interact with systems in on-premises data centers or Azure services in virtual networks. This feature composes with Azure Network resources such as Application Gateway, Express Route, and other services available through Azure such as Cloudflare and Palo Alto Firewall.
- And the second, Autoscale, which helps with application scaling. The feature, when enabled, automates the upscaling or downscaling of the application based on load or schedule – thus providing cost-efficiency and better performance.
Ryan Morgan, vice president of software engineering at VMware, stated in organisation's announcement blog post on the GA of Spring Cloud:
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.
Also, Josh Long, developer advocate at VMware, wrote in a recent Spring Blog about Azure Spring Cloud:
The key concept of Azure Spring Cloud is to optimize the path to production for Spring Boot-based microservices on a platform that leverages the Azure Kubernetes service, abstracting away all the complexity involved in managing Kubernetes.
Currently, Azure Spring Cloud is available in the US, Europe, Middle-East, Asia and Pacific Azure regions, with more regions are coming soon. Furthermore, pricing details of the service are available on the pricing page and guidance on the documentation lading page, QuickStart and GitHub.