VMware backs Microsoft's Azure Spring Cloud for developers

Microsoft Azure Spring Cloud is putting developers at the centre of the action, with the belief that more productive developers lead to more functionality, and happier customers.

VMware's support of Azure Spring Cloud, a fully managed service for Spring Boot apps, means that developers using VMware and Azure can take advantage of VMware's full support.

Microsoft announced general availability in 10 regions: Australia East, Southeast Asia, West US2, Central US, South Central US, East US, East US2, UK South, North Europe, and West Europe.

VMware states that "Azure Spring Cloud removes the burden and related challenges of setting up and managing Spring Cloud infrastructure by combining several popular components to deliver a production-ready environment for Spring microservices".

VMware's vice president of software engineering, Ryan Morgan, Spring's evolution has added more functionality so that developers could simplify microservices development, event-driven applications, batch processing, and reactive applications.

While some developers can develop, test, and deploy within the day, complexity can be an issue. VMware says it aims to help address that complexity.

"Azure Spring Cloud removes the burden and related challenges of setting up and managing Spring Cloud infrastructure," says Morgan.

It combines components such as Spring Cloud, open source Kubernetes native build service kpack, and Azure Kubernetes Service, all with enterprise-level support.

As a managed service, users can focus on deploying source code or artifacts and Azure Spring Cloud can handle tasks including service discovery, configuration management, and distributed tracing.

Morgan adds, "Azure Spring Cloud supports blue/green deployments, so you can immediately fall back to a previous version when necessary. You can also automate your CI/CD pipelines through the integration with the DevOps tools of your choice, including Azure DevOps and Jenkins.

Once developers have built and deployed their applications to Azure Spring Cloud, Microsoft will take over the updates and patches. This is because it is fully managed.

Azure Monitor can also help to spot performance issues such as service performance and bottlenecks.

Azure Spring Cloud will soon enable developers to autoscale on demand. The preview feature allows for predefined schedules and limits for scaling out in the infrastructure supporting apps, as well as app instances.

Microsoft's developer division corporate vice president Julia Liuson says, "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.

Azure Spring Cloud is generally available.