Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability of Azure Spring Cloud, a managed service designed to reduce the amount of work involved in building and maintaining enterprise applications on its cloud platform.

Azure Spring Cloud is the fruit of a collaboration with VMware Inc. and was first previewed by the companies last year. The service is based on the popular open-source Spring application development framework.

Spring, which is used by companies such as Netflix Inc., enables enterprises to build applications faster by providing them with ready-made software building blocks they can use in their projects. Microsoft’s cloud service uses a specific edition of the framework called Spring Boot, which is essentially a simplified version with pre-configured settings that companies don’t need to set up on their own.

Azure Spring Cloud’s value proposition is that it adds yet another level of simplification by automating infrastructure management. The service runs on a managed basis atop Azure. As a result, companies don’t need to worry about maintaining the hardware powering their applications. 

Microsoft has also thrown in several value-added features to automate related administrative tasks. There’s an autoscaling tool that optimizes applications’  infrastructure usage, network security features and an integration with Azure Monitor, which administrators can use to find potential issues in their environments. To help with complex issues that a company may struggle to fix on its own, Azure Spring Cloud also comes with technical support from Microsoft and VMware. 

The launch of the service into general availability was announced during VMware’s virtual Spring One event today. The Dell Technologies Inc. unit is the main backer of the upstream open-source version of the framework and also sells a commercial edition. Spring is a key element of in the company’s push to help its customers modernize their applications with containers, VMware executive Ajay Patel detailed in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE against the backdrop of Spring One.

As for Microsoft, its work with VMware on Azure Spring Cloud is a way to make its public cloud more appealing for the many enterprises that use Spring. By removing the hassle of managing infrastructure, the new service makes the framework easier to use.

Offerings that make Spring more accessible can ultimately also boost the framework’s enterprise adoption by lowering the entry barrier. 

Photo: Microsoft