Azure Spring Cloud: a fully managed service for Spring Boot apps is now generally available

Azure Spring Cloud — a fully managed service for Spring Boot apps—is now generally available. With Azure Spring Cloud, you can focus on building the apps that run your business without the hassle of managing infrastructure. Simply deploy your JARs or code and Azure Spring Cloud will automatically wire your apps with the Spring service runtime. Once deployed you can easily monitor application performance, fix errors, and rapidly improve applications.

Azure Spring Cloud is jointly built, operated, and supported by Microsoft and VMware. You can use Azure Spring Cloud for your most demanding applications and be assured that Microsoft and VMware are standing behind the service to ensure your success.

Azure Spring Cloud is now available in 10 regions—West US2, Central US, South Central US, East US, East US2, UK South, North Europe, West Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia East—across four continents. We expect to add 10 more regions in the coming months. You can start using Azure Spring Cloud in production today.

In October 2019, Microsoft and VMware announced the collaboration of Azure Spring Cloud. Since then, many customers have approached us about this differentiated offer. Java developers in many organizations have used the service and provided us with plenty of feedback to prioritize features to help shape Azure Spring Cloud. We have enabled security features to manage secrets, hybrid deployments, control ingress and egress to apps, and secure communications using TLS/SSL. To support performance and reliability we have enabled autoscaling, log streaming, alerts, and self-diagnostics.

Developers say that it is simple to deploy, automate, operate, and monitor Spring Boot and Spring Cloud applications in Azure Spring Cloud. Our enterprise customers have benefited from fully managed infrastructure, automation, easier monitoring and troubleshooting, and increased developer productivity and satisfaction.

“The Azure Spring Cloud allows our teams to build new business services rapidly, as the platform and underlying infrastructure is fully managed. The platform is integrated with the Azure ecosystem, which enables us to achieve the desired level of automation and means to operate the services securely. Now that we have the first set of services running in production,  it is all about doing more of the same using the Azure Spring Cloud to meet our critical delivery deadlines.”—Nicolas Andres, Head IT Group Finance Program, Swiss Re Management Ltd. (Switzerland)

“Raley’s is very pleased to collaborate with the Microsoft team. Spring Boot and Azure Spring Cloud have enabled our developers to focus more on feature development and more frequent deployments without worrying about underlying infrastructure or monitoring. The team is pleased with Spring Boot and Azure Spring Cloud, and looking to migrate the majority of our services to Spring Boot in next 6 months”—Abhay Kamble, Director, Unified Commerce, Raley’s (United States)

“As a leading integrated HR services provider, Liantis pursues new business opportunities in the digital economy, serving our customers with powerful applications and tools. The Azure Spring Cloud capabilities complement and extend our existing Spring Cloud software factory, allowing us to focus on the development of core business functionalities.”—Nicolas Van Kerschaver, CIO, Liantis (Belgium)

“Production is the happiest place on earth. I love seeing my applications there. I do not love wearing the pager! Spring Boot and Spring Cloud give me a framework for building resilient, cloud-native software.  Azure Spring Cloud builds on the rich ecosystems of Microsoft Azure, Spring, and Kubernetes to deliver a turnkey platform optimized for Spring-based applications and services. Spring and Azure Spring Cloud let me deliver valuable software without worrying as much about the pager. They get me to production.” —Josh Long, Spring Developer Advocate, VMware

Distributed tracing

One of the Azure Spring Cloud features that customers have found particularly valuable is distributed tracing. Developers can easily identify issues in their applications and quickly troubleshoot and fix them.

Figure 1: Microservice transactions in Application Insights.

The diagram above captures microservice transactions in Application Insights for 4 hours with 70 percent sampling rate. We purposely dropped one of the microservices, to showcase services that are operating correctly (green) and those with bottlenecks (red). You can use integrated distributed tracing in Azure Spring Cloud to troubleshoot those bottlenecks, plan capacities and keep an eye on production.

Azure Spring Cloud in Managed Virtual Network

Security is a key tenet of Azure Spring Cloud. Customers want to isolate Azure Spring Cloud from the internet or place it in their own corporate networks. We are happy to share the preview of Managed Virtual Network in Azure Spring Cloud. This feature allows you 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.

In addition, the feature composes with Azure network resources such as Application Gateway, Azure Firewall, Azure Front Door and Express Route, and popular network products such as Palo Alto Firewall, F5 Big-IP, Cloudflare, and Infoblox. This way, you can secure the perimeters around your Spring Boot apps.

Figure 2: Reference architecture of Managed Virtual Network and Azure Spring Cloud.

Drive higher utilization of apps in Azure Spring Cloud with Autoscale

Autoscale has been one of the most sought-after features from customers. We are excited to share the preview of Autoscale in Azure Spring Cloud. It enables you to be more productive and cost-efficient by automatically scaling apps up or down based on load or schedule. Once Autoscale is enabled, you can be rest assured that the service will take care of your underlying infrastructure and the load on your apps.

In the load or metric-based mode, your apps will be horizontally scaled out to exactly how many apps and resources are needed for the load, but never go beyond the maximum limits that you set. Similarly, the number of apps and resources will be horizontally scaled-in to meet the minimum to meet your load, but never go below the minimum limits that you set. In the schedule-based mode, your apps will be scaled out and in based on your predefined schedule and limits.

Figure 3: Autoscaling in Azure Spring Cloud.

Build your solutions today

Azure Spring Cloud abstracts away the complexity of infrastructure management and Spring Cloud middleware management, so you can focus on building your business logic and let Azure take care of dynamic scaling, patches, security, compliance, and high availability. With a few steps, you can provision Azure Spring Cloud, create apps, deploy, and scale Spring Boot apps and start monitoring in minutes.

Source: microsoft.com