How to Migrate Spring Apps to Azure?

Spring is one of the most popular frameworks used for developing enterprise applications as it allows developers to focus on application-level business logic, without having to worry about deployment environments. With Spring Boot, developers can create stand-alone, production-grade applications quickly and easily. With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are increasingly looking for solutions to move their on-premises applications to the cloud for better scalability, lower maintenance, and simplified management. In this article, we will focus on migrating Spring Boot applications to Azure Spring Cloud.

What Are the Advantages of Migrating Spring Apps to Azure Spring Cloud?

Azure Spring Cloud is a platform as a service (PaaS) solution that is designed to deploy Spring Boot microservice applications easily without code refactoring. It provides tools for monitoring and diagnostics, configuration management, service discovery, CI/CD integration, and blue-green deployments, for comprehensive application lifecycle management.

• Organizations can manage their existing Spring apps efficiently and manage cloud scaling and costs better.
• Applications can be modernized seamlessly to improve their agility and speed of delivery with Spring Cloud.
• Java applications can be run in the cloud at scale and drive higher usage, without having to rely on complicated infrastructure.
• Development and deployment can take place rapidly without having to depend on containerization.
• Production workloads can be monitored effortlessly and with greater efficiency.

How to Migrate Spring Boot Apps to Azure?

Migrating Spring Boot apps to Azure requires assessment and inventorying to establish the application’s compatibility with Azure. Follow the steps below to migrate Spring apps to Azure.

• Pre-migration activities

  Before any application can be migrated to Azure, its components have to be inspected, to ensure that code does not contain a local state that must not be lost or duplicated. If so, the application state can be stored in Azure Cache for Redis, Azure CosmosDB, or some other external database, such as Azure SQL. If file systems are used, read-only static content can be served with Azure Blob Storage and Azure CDN. Similarly, the combination can be used with Azure Functions to handle dynamically published static content.

  As Azure Spring Cloud offers support for specific versions of Java, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud, migrate the application a supported version in its current environment to test the configuration. Examine dependencies, and update to a supported version. Identify log aggregation solutions, application performance management (APM) agents, external resources, connection strings for databases, JMS message brokers, external caches, identity providers, and clients that rely on non-standard ports.

  Once these dependencies have been identified, certificates, secret strings and passwords, and deployment architecture have to be inspected.

• Migrating Spring Apps to Azure Spring Cloud

  Migrating a Spring Boot application to Azure Spring Cloud begins with the provisioning of an Azure Spring Cloud instance in the Azure subscription. Once the application is deployed to Azure Spring Cloud, its event logs and diagnostics should be visible with a service such as Azure Monitor Log Analytics. Depending upon the platform, an appropriate Azure service can be used for streaming the console output. For example, Azure Event Hub can be used for LogStash/ELK Stack, while Azure Blob Storage can be used for aggregating event logs with Splunk.

  If the application reads or writes to the local file system, the local file system can be replaced with the built-in persistent storage in Azure Spring Cloud. Similarly, certificates will have to be migrated to Azure KeyVault and application performance management (APM) integrations and metrics clients and endpoints will have to be disabled before the application is deployed to Azure Spring Cloud.

  Finally, per-service configuration settings can be injected into appropriate services, and the identity provider can be migrated and enabled before externally exposing the applications deployed to Azure Spring Cloud.

Apps4Rent Can Help with Azure Spring Cloud Migration

As organizations increasingly migrate production workloads powered using Spring from on-premises datacenters Kubernetes and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, there are several challenges involved in transforming monolith apps to cloud-friendly apps, upgrading from unsupported versions and cloud migration.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner for Application Integration, Cloud Platform, and Cloud Productivity, Apps4Rent provides managed Azure services for application modernization and cloud migration. Contact our Azure solution architects, available 24/7 via phone, chat, and email for assistance.