News

Microsoft Partners with Pivotal for Managed Spring Boot Azure Service

• By Kurt Mackie
• 10/09/2019

Microsoft has teamed up with Pivotal Software to launch a private preview of Azure Spring Cloud, seeking to ease the development of Java-based cloud microservices.

The idea is to help developers focus on building scalable microservices rather than more mundane tasks like configuring infrastructure.

The service is currently available as a private preview (sign-up here), but is scheduled to become a public preview "before the end of the calendar year," according to Microsoft's announcement.

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.