Spring Consulting provides organizations with hands-on support to help upgrade a portfolio of apps to the latest version of Spring, build new Spring apps, or migrate an existing application portfolio to Spring. Organizations can take advantage of experts with direct ties to the committers of the Spring portfolio and automated tooling so their development teams can make the most of the latest benefits in the Spring ecosystem.
During an engagement, our Spring experts will apply decades of experience in modernizing and building in Spring to enable crucial development skills being transferred to customer teams in order to help them achieve long-term results after our engagement ends.
The state of Spring
In November of 2022, the Spring Framework underwent a significant upgrade with the release of Spring Framework 6.x and Spring Boot 3.x. This release laid the foundation for Java application development for the next decade and provides organizations with a multitude of reasons to upgrade, including faster applications, new DevX features, a smaller application memory footprint, and more.
With the end of OSS support for the prior version of Spring Boot (2.7) ending in November of this year, we’ve heard from many customers that they are considering upgrading sooner rather than later. At the same time, we’ve also heard that making this jump across an entire Spring portfolio is a lift organizations might have yet to plan for in their roadmap.
Develop a culture of continuous upgrades
When we look at the ecosystem that Spring lives within, we see things changing, and the rate of change is accelerating. Java is released every six months. Spring Boot is released every six months. Hibernate is released every quarter to six months. So not only is the rate of change happening faster, but it's also becoming more aggressive. For Jakarta EE 11, due out in Q1 of next year, the minimum version of Java will be Java 21, a version of Java that has yet to be released.
Beyond the technical benefits new versions provide, another key driver for staying up to date with open source software is compliance. In the face of recent high-profile data breaches and an evolving regulatory landscape, security teams are pushing developers to upgrade applications containing unsupported open source software and libraries as soon as possible. In highly regulated industries such as banking and finance, this has become even more of a sticking point.
Getting up to date can't be a once-every-five-year task that stops the development of features going forward. It needs to be a continuous practice.
By leveraging the upgrade service of Spring Consulting, customers can continue business as usual with minimal disruption to their development roadmap while mitigating the risk of managing the upgrade internally or continuing to run an unsupported version of Spring or Spring Boot. But beyond that, we'll help teams develop a culture built around continuous upgrades, so they can stay up to date with additional releases in the future and remain focused on what matters, writing code and creating new business value.
Part of VMware's Spring Solutions
The introduction of Spring Consulting also rounds out our Spring Solutions, enabling us to provide your team with what they need to stay supported, sharp, and current on the Spring Framework.
Whether you need 24-7 commercial support from VMware Spring Runtime, on-demand education from Spring Academy, or hands-on help from Spring Consulting, we've got you covered, and who better to help than the stewards of Spring? You chose Spring for a reason; we'll help your applications make the most of it.
To learn more about Spring Consulting and our commercial Spring offerings, visit Spring.IO/Solutions. Read all of the announcements VMware made at SpringOne 2023.
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More Content by Evan Prowse
