News

Microsoft, Pivotal Collaborate on Azure Spring Cloud

• By Kurt Mackie
• October 09, 2019

Azure Spring Cloud, a developer service jointly built and operated by Pivotal Software and Microsoft, debuted as a private preview this week.

Azure Spring Cloud promises to take away various infrastructure maintenance concerns for developers of Spring Boot-based Java applications. The service is currently available as a private preview (sign-up here), but it'll reach the public preview stage "before the end of the calendar year," according to Microsoft's announcement on Tuesday.

Spring Boot is an extension of the Spring Framework for Java developers. Spring Boot eases matters for Spring developers by automatically configuring certain Spring functionality within code (see this Baeldung overview article for nuances).

Azure Spring Cloud offers a complete runtime environment for Spring Boot apps, but it also promises to help Spring Boot developers with typical IT infrastructure concerns. The infrastructure behind Azure Spring Cloud includes Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service, a container orchestration service managed by Microsoft where the container technology is used to spin up apps without conflicts. Azure Spring Cloud also includes Pivotal's kpack resource controllers for Kubernetes. Lastly, the Azure Spring Cloud provides "a service registry, client-side load balancing and circuit-breakers," according to Pivotal's announcement. 

The Azure Spring Cloud service gets set up using the Azure Portal management console. The service can be selected from Azure Marketplace listings within the console. Developers can then use the Azure Command Line Interface to push their applications up into the Azure Spring Cloud service using a JAR or Docker image.

The service allows developers access to various microservices to build applications. It's also said to be easy to connect Spring Boot applications to various Azure services, such as "Cosmos DB, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Cache for Redis," among others.

Developers can use their favorite integrated development environments (IDEs) with the Azure Spring Cloud service, such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio Code and more. On the IT side, it's possible to send log information to "incumbent observability products," according to Pivotal. The service gets automatically patched by both Pivotal and Microsoft.

The Azure Spring Cloud service is planned for availability across various Azure regions. It'll be initially available in "Azure West Europe, Azure East US, Azure West US 2, and Azure Southeast Asia," according to Pivotal's announcement.