As customers have moved their workloads to the cloud, we’ve seen a growth in the use of cloud-native architectures, particularly microservices. Microservice-based architectures help improve scalability and velocity but implementing them can pose challenges. For many Java developers, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud have helped address these challenges, providing a robust platform with well-established patterns for developing and operating microservice applications. But creating and maintaining a Spring Cloud environment requires work. Such as setting up the infrastructure for dynamic scaling, installing and managing multiple components, and wiring up the application to your logging infrastructure.

To help make it simpler to deploy and operate Spring Cloud applications, together with Pivotal, Microsoft have created Azure Spring Cloud.

Azure Spring Cloud is jointly built, operated, and supported by both Pivotal and Microsoft. This means that you can use Azure Spring Cloud for your most demanding applications and know that both Pivotal and Microsoft are standing behind the service to ensure your success.

High productivity development

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, security patches, compliance standards, and high availability.

With a few clicks, you can provision an Azure Spring Cloud instance. After configuring a couple dependencies in your pom file, your Spring Cloud app is automatically wired up with Spring Cloud Config Server and Service Registry. Furthermore, you can deploy and scale Spring Boot applications in seconds.

To accelerate your development experience, we provide support for the Azure Spring Cloud Maven plugin and VS Code extensions that optimize Spring development. In other words, you can use the tools that you already know and love.

Ease of monitoring

With out-of-the-box support for aggregating logs, metrics, and distributed app traces into Azure Monitor, you can easily visualize how your applications are performing, detect and diagnose issues across microservice applications and their dependencies, drill into monitoring data for troubleshooting and gain better understanding of what end-users do with your apps.

Open source innovation with Spring integrations

Azure Spring Cloud sets up the compute foundation for cloud-native Spring applications. From there, Azure Spring Cloud makes it simple to connect to data services such as Azure SQL Database, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Cosmos DB to enable enterprise grade end-user authentication and authorization using Azure Active Directory, to bind cloud streams with Service Bus or Event Hubs, and to load and manage secrets with Azure Key Vault. To help you save the effort of manually figuring out dependencies and eliminate boilerplate code, we’ve created a rich library of Spring integrations and starters for your Spring applications.

Sign up for Azure Spring Cloud

Both Pivotal and Microsoft are looking forward to hearing feedback on the new Azure Spring Cloud from our joint customers. If you’re interested in joining the private preview, please submit your contact details here. To hear more from Pivotal on today’s announcement, head over to their blog and let us know what you think.

The service will be available in public preview, for all customers, before end of the calendar year.