Fresh off the exciting announcement of Azure Spring Cloud’s general availability at SpringOne, today we are happy to announce the public preview of Steeltoe .NET support.
Azure Spring Cloud is a fully managed service for Spring Boot—and now Steeltoe .NET—apps. As a native Azure service, it is operated by Microsoft. But VMware has partnered closely with Microsoft in the development of the service and fully supports Microsoft in its operation of Azure Spring Cloud.
Steeltoe is an open source project focused on making it easier and safer to develop .NET microservices applications. It provides an application framework with libraries for .NET Framework and .NET Core developers to build cloud native applications and microservices. It’s one of the most popular .NET frameworks, having been downloaded more than 12 million times on NuGet.
It’s a Java and .NET world
Most enterprises today have a pretty even split of Java and .NET applications. And now, as they look to build new apps and modernize their existing ones, they have a solution that allows them to utilize Spring Boot, the leading Java runtime for modern apps, and Steeltoe to run all of those applications in the same ecosystem.
Best of all, you can focus on developing great apps in either language and leave the burden of maintaining Spring Cloud middleware and Kubernetes to Microsoft and VMware.
What does Azure Spring Cloud provide?
Azure Spring Cloud provides a number of resources and tools to make it easy to build, deploy, and run applications, like Eureka service discovery, external application configuration, and distributed tracing.To improve the development experience, Microsoft will soon provide a Visual Studio extension for Azure Spring Cloud to deploy Steeltoe .NET apps as well.
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 integration with the DevOps tools of your choice, including Azure DevOps and Jenkins.
It also provides you with a number of tools and features to help simplify Day 2 operations, including being a fully managed service. All patching of and updates to the underlying infrastructure are handled for you, by Microsoft. That takes a huge operational burden off the table.
To help you quickly identify and fix performance issues, Azure Spring Cloud is integrated with Azure Monitor. The visual UI provides a great topological overview of the different services and how they interact. And you can use the collected metrics to set up alerts. The diagram below shows transactions of both Java and .NET apps within the same Azure Spring Cloud service instance.
Azure Spring Cloud enables you to autoscale based on demand. Currently in preview, this feature allows you to set predefined schedules and limits for scaling out in the infrastructure supporting your apps as well as in app instances. To learn more about autoscaling, check out this tutorial.
Azure Spring Cloud is available in 10 regions—West US2, Central US, South Central US, East US, East US2, UK South, North Europe, West Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia East—across four continents. Microsoft expects to add 10 more regions in the coming months.
Deploy your first app today
Azure Spring Cloud is an enterprise-ready solution. Use it to deploy and run your most demanding applications at scale, secure in the knowledge that all the middleware and infrastructure management is handled by Microsoft. Deploy Steeltoe .NET apps to Azure Spring Cloud today using the available quickstart.
Want more details? Check out the Microsoft announcement.
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