Prepare an application for deployment in Azure Spring Apps

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Note

The Basic, Standard, and Enterprise plans will be deprecated starting from mid-March, 2025, with a 3 year retirement period. We recommend transitioning to Azure Container Apps. For more information, see the Azure Spring Apps retirement announcement.

The Standard consumption and dedicated plan will be deprecated starting September 30, 2024, with a complete shutdown after six months. We recommend transitioning to Azure Container Apps.

Note

Azure Spring Apps is the new name for the Azure Spring Cloud service. Although the service has a new name, you'll see the old name in some places for a while as we work to update assets such as screenshots, videos, and diagrams.

This article shows how to prepare an existing Java Spring application for deployment to Azure Spring Apps. If configured properly, Azure Spring Apps provides robust services to monitor, scale, and update your Java Spring application.

Before running this example, you can try the basic quickstart.

Other examples explain how to deploy an application to Azure Spring Apps when the POM file is configured.

This article explains the required dependencies and how to add them to the POM file.

Java Runtime version

For details, see the Java runtime and OS versions section of the Azure Spring Apps FAQ.

Spring Boot and Spring Cloud versions

To prepare an existing Spring Boot application for deployment to Azure Spring Apps, include the Spring Boot and Spring Cloud dependencies in the application POM file as shown in the following sections.

Azure Spring Apps supports the latest Spring Boot or Spring Cloud major version starting from 30 days after its release. Azure Spring Apps supports the latest minor version as soon as it's released. You can get supported Spring Boot versions from Spring Boot Releases and Spring Cloud versions from Spring Cloud Releases.

The following table lists the supported Spring Boot and Spring Cloud combinations:

Spring Boot version Spring Cloud version End of support
3.2.x 2023.0.x also known as Leyton 2024-11-23
3.1.x 2022.0.3+ also known as Kilburn 2024-05-18
3.0.x 2022.0.3+ also known as Kilburn 2023-11-24
2.7.x 2021.0.3+ also known as Jubilee 2023-11-24

For more information, see the following pages:

To enable the built-in features of Azure Spring Apps from service registry to distributed tracing, you need to also include the following dependencies in your application. You can drop some of these dependencies if you don't need corresponding features for the specific apps.

Service Registry

To use the managed Azure Service Registry service, include the spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client dependency in the pom.xml file as shown here:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client</artifactId>
</dependency>

The endpoint of the Service Registry server is automatically injected as environment variables with your app. Applications can register themselves with the Service Registry server and discover other dependent applications.

EnableDiscoveryClient annotation

Add the following annotation to the application source code.

@EnableDiscoveryClient

For example, see the piggymetrics application from earlier examples:

package com.piggymetrics.gateway;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.cloud.client.discovery.EnableDiscoveryClient;
import org.springframework.cloud.netflix.zuul.EnableZuulProxy;

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableDiscoveryClient
@EnableZuulProxy

public class GatewayApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(GatewayApplication.class, args);
    }
}

Distributed configuration

To enable distributed configuration, include the following spring-cloud-config-client dependency in the dependencies section of your pom.xml file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-config-client</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-bootstrap</artifactId>
</dependency>

Warning

Don't specify spring.cloud.config.enabled=false in your bootstrap configuration. Otherwise, your application stops working with Config Server.

Metrics

Include the spring-boot-starter-actuator dependency in the dependencies section of your pom.xml file as shown here:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
</dependency>

Metrics are periodically pulled from the JMX endpoints. You can visualize the metrics by using the Azure portal.

Warning

You must specify spring.jmx.enabled=true in your configuration property. Otherwise, metrics can't be visualized in the Azure portal.

See also

Next steps

In this article, you learned how to configure your Java Spring application for deployment to Azure Spring Apps. To learn how to set up a Config Server instance, see Set up a Config Server instance.

More samples are available on GitHub: Azure Spring Apps Samples.