Monolithic architecture has been mainstream for many years for the design of a software application. But when it comes to scalability and continuous development of large applications, they always hindered the developers with their slow pace of development and are difficult to scale. Therefore, it led to the extensive usage of microservices which are highly scalable and secure solutions that can be built at a rapid pace.

“Global Companies like Netflix, Amazon, Uber, and Spotify embraced the microservice architecture to provide better scalability and improved services.”

What are microservices?

What is Azure spring Cloud?

What are the features of Azure Spring Cloud?

How to deploy Microservices to Azure Spring Cloud?

Our offerings with Azure spring cloud

What are microservices?

Microservice architecture or simply Microservices is an architecture paradigm where an application is divided into several independent lightweight units, working together as a network of services. It enables rapid development, high maintainability, and better scaling compared to monolithic architecture. There are many frameworks available to develop microservices in various programming languages. For example, Spring-Boot is a very popular and developer-friendly framework that enables developers to build microservices in JAVA. It has a vast developer community and provides a robust programming and configuration model.

“Spring-Boot is a leading framework for building cloud-native applications with a reported 60% market share (increased by 16% than in 2020)

– Jakarta EE Developer Survey, 2021″

What is Azure spring Cloud?

Source: Azure

Though microservices are lightweight, it is a challenge to deploy them in a self-hosted environment. Azure provides a fully managed hosting environment for deploying spring microservices called Azure Spring Cloud to solve this problem and simplify the process.

Azure Spring Cloud is built on top of Azure Kubernetes services, provides various services like Deployment, monitoring, diagnostics, and CI/CD integration so that the developers can concentrate on the code without worrying much about the infrastructure. It also provides built-in Config Server and Service discovery features which are the essential parts of the spring boot framework.

What are the features of Azure Spring Cloud?

1. Easy Deployment and configuration:

Spring microservices can be directly deployed into the spring cloud without changing any code using the build artifacts generated by either MAVEN or GRADLE tool. You can start, stop, restart and even delete the microservices using Azure portal or Azure CLI. After deploying, Azure provides a test end-point to test the functionality of the microservice.

2. Auto and Manual Scaling facilities:

Azure enables us to either manually scale or autoscale the services based on the requirement. We can also adjust the amount of CPU and memory used by a particular microservice.

3. Managed Config Server and Service Discovery:
Config Server and Service registry are essential parts of the spring-boot framework. Config Server is a centralized configuration server that maintains the configuration of several services remotely. Service discovery maintains a Client-Server architecture among other microservices and allows inter-service communication. Spring cloud manages the cloud-config server and Service Discovery server. It also adds the support to add independently hosted microservices to add as a client to Azure spring cloud without deploying in it.
4. In Detailed Monitoring:

Azure integrates Log Analytics Workspace and Application Insights into the Spring Cloud to better monitor the microservices. Using Log Analytics, we could write SQL-like queries to fetch the logs.

Source: AZURE

Application insights provide an Application map to visualize API calls for the applications, live metrics stream, failures, and performance metrics in real-time, and create alerts in case of events.
5. Better Security Control:
Azure provides Active Directory(AD) to manage identity-based access and authentication across the users or apps and Azure Key Vault stores the access keys. Using AD and Key Vault, we can securely access azure resources without credentials inside the code.
We can seamlessly integrate other Azure services to store, analyze and manipulate the data generated by microservices using Service bindings. Azure currently supports Service Bindings for CosmosDB, Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Database for MySQL & PostgreSQL, Azure SQL Server, Azure Service Bus, and Event hub.
6. Integration with other services:

We can seamlessly integrate other Azure services to store, analyze and manipulate the data generated by microservices using Service bindings. Azure currently supports Service Bindings for CosmosDB, Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Database for MySQL & PostgreSQL, Azure SQL Server, Azure Service Bus, and Event hub.

7. Automated Deployments:
We can Automatically deploy updates to our services in Spring Cloud using CI/CD tools without affecting current deployments’ functioning. In addition, Azure provides Azure DevOps to help organize and control essential tasks during Deployment. We can also set a Blue-Green deployment pattern for better staging and Deployment of ongoing updates.

How to deploy Microservices to Azure Spring Cloud?

To deploy your microservice to Azure Spring Cloud,

Initialize your spring application using Spring Initializr.
Add required dependencies to your application. For example, spring Web, Eureka Discovery Client, Spring Boot Actuator, and Config Client dependencies are essential to deploy the app in Spring Cloud.
Add code to your Controller and build your project using Maven.
Open Azure Portal your browser and Create a Spring Cloud Instance.
Fill out the details, select tier for your instance, and click on create-to-create Spring Cloud. There are two tiers available Basic and Standard.
Go to the Apps section and create an application inside Spring Cloud Instance.
To deploy your application using the JAR file generated after Maven build, use the “az spring-cloud app deploy”
You can check the deployment status in the apps section and use the end-point URL to test the application when it is ready.

Our offerings with Azure spring cloud

CloudThat provides end-to-end support with all the Azure services. As a pioneer in the Cloud Computing training realm, we are a Microsoft Gold Partner, AWS (Amazon Web Services) Advanced Consulting Partner, and Training partner. We are on a mission to build a robust cloud computing ecosystem by disseminating knowledge on technological intricacies within the cloud space.

Read more about CloudThat’s Consulting and Expert Advisory here: https://www.cloudthat.com/expert-advisory/