If you are a Spring developer and maintaining some Spring apps for your company, upgrading to the new Spring version should be a regular task for you. While upgrading to the latest versions of Spring Boot and JDK is a monumental step forward, bringing substantial performance improvements and new features to enjoy, it’s a fact that this leap can pose significant challenges and demand substantial effort from developers. Typically, open-source Spring project minor releases receive support for a minimum of 12 months from the date of initial release, and then making sure upgrading the Spring version timely before reaching the end-of-life date is a hard commitment to avoid putting your mission-critical workloads at risk. Now with VMware Tanzu Spring Runtime Support naturally built in Azure Spring Apps Enterprise, you can get the extended support to ease your own life in chasing the new Spring versions. Today we’re announcing that the deadline for this support for Spring boot 2.x is further extending beyond the previously announced February 2025 to August 2025.
What is Tanzu Spring Runtime
Tanzu Spring Runtime is a commercial support from VMware and gives you access to Spring experts, enabling you to unlock the full potential of the Spring ecosystem to develop and deploy applications faster. On top of it, each Spring project minor release receives commercial support for a minimum of 24 months from the date of initial release which is at least 12 months extended compared with the OSS support period. Below snapshot tells explicitly the support period difference of Spring Boot project between OSS and commercial support: you can see at least additional 15 months are provided from the commercial support by Tanzu Spring Runtime.
And it covers plenty of Spring projects you are using today:
Tanzu Spring Runtime’s extended support is a lifeline for enterprises, offering the flexibility to implement these changes on their own schedules. We believe that empowering the enterprise community with a tailored timeline ensures a smoother transition without compromising on the incredible benefits of the latest Spring versions.
Azure Spring Apps Enterprise Offers Tanzu Spring Runtime as a built-in support
Azure Spring Apps is a fully managed service for Spring developers built upon strong partnership and collaboration with VMware. It empowers you to focus on your applications without the complexity of infrastructure management. You can deploy any type of Spring apps, including web apps, microservices, event-driven, serverless, batch, and more. You don’t need to learn or manage Kubernetes, and you get full integration with Azure’s ecosystem while still being able to use your existing investments.
Azure Spring Apps Enterprise as its most advanced plan is naturally designed to serve mission critical workloads from enterprise customers in production environment by additionally offering 99.95% SLA assurance, fully managed VMware Tanzu components and Tanzu Spring Runtime. Once purchasing Azure Spring Apps Enterprise, you can automatically acquire Tanzu Spring Runtime support with no additional steps.
We now offer extended Support for Spring Boot 2 Projects
Open source support for Spring Boot 2 projects will end on November 25, 2023, but you can gain more time to upgrade your projects with the built-in long-term support through Tanzu Spring Runtime in Azure Spring Apps Enterprise. On top of VMware’s strong commitment to Spring community, now we are glad to announce that the deadline for this support is extending beyond the previously announced February 2025 to August 2025 and for Azure Spring Apps Enterprise customers you automatically get this extended support! This decision from VMware is a direct response to valuable feedback from enterprises, including industry giants like Netflix, that have expressed the need for more time and flexibility when transitioning to the newest major versions of Spring Boot and the Java Development Kit (JDK). With this extended support, we’re extending our commitment to ensuring a seamless transition for developers and enterprises. Your journey to the latest and greatest in Spring development just got a whole lot smoother! you can also directly take a look at VMware's announcement.
To help you get started, we have monthly FREE grants on all tiers – 50 vCPU Hours and 100 memory GB Hours per tier.
Additional Resources
- Learn using an MS Learn module or self-paced workshop on GitHub
- Deploy your first Spring app to Azure!
- Deploy the demo Fitness Store Spring Boot app to Azure
- Deploy the demo Animal Rescue Spring Boot app to Azure
- Learn more about implementing solutions on Azure Spring Apps
- Deploy Spring Boot apps by leveraging enterprise best practices –Azure Spring Apps Reference Architecture
- Migrate your Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Tomcat applications to Azure Spring Apps
- Wire Spring applications to interact with Azure services
- For feedback and questions, please raise your issues on our GitHub, or reach out to our product team directly via AzureSpringCloud-Talk@service.microsoft.com.
To learn more about Spring Cloud Azure, we invite you to visit the following links:
- Reach out to us on StackOverflow or GitHub.
- Reference Documentation
- Conceptual Documentation
- Code Samples
- Spring Version Mapping