Microsoft Corp. and Pivotal Software Inc. are making it easier for developers to build microservices-based applications atop the Spring Boot framework.

The companies today launched a private preview of a new service called Azure Spring Cloud. It’s a fully managed and production-ready Azure cloud service that can be used to build scalable microservices without worrying about the supporting information technology infrastructure.

Spring Boot is a simplified version of Pivotal’s Spring Framework for building Java-based microservices, which are the components of modern, cloud-native applications.

Azure Spring Cloud combines everything needed to create a complete runtime for microservices built using Spring Boot, enabling developers to get their apps up and running with minimal effort involved. It includes essential tools and frameworks necessary to add features such as a service registry, client-side load balancing and circuit-breakers.

It also comes with kpack, which is a set of resource controllers for Kubernetes, the popular orchestration software used to manage large deployments of microservices-based apps. And the service is fully integrated with the Azure Kubernetes Service itself.

The big advantage of using Azure Spring Cloud is that it simplifies many of the tasks associated with building cloud-native applications that run on Kubernetes. But there are other benefits too, such as being able to integrate applications with existing Azure services such as Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Cache for Redis and CosmosDB.

Developers can also tap into Azure Monitor to get insights on the state of their applications’ health and performance, and diagnose any potential issues. It also provides more meaningful data on how end users are actually using the applications.

Microsoft is hoping to attract more developers to use its Azure Cloud infrastructure, and by integrating with a popular platform like Spring it also gets the attention of enterprises that build apps within Pivotal’s ecosystem, said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc.

“It’s a smart move by Microsoft,” Mueller said. “This is integration delivered right, with both developer and test environments that efficiently leverage Kubernetes.”

Microsoft said the preview of Azure Spring Cloud service will be made available in its Azure West Europe, Azure East US, Azure West US 2 and Azure Southeast Asia regions. Those interested in signing up for the preview can do so here.

Image: Microsoft