Deploying Spring Boot to Azure Spring Apps

Azure Spring Apps (formerly Azure Spring Cloud) is a managed platform specifically designed for Spring Boot services — it provides built-in Spring Cloud infrastructure like Config Server and Service Registry without you running and maintaining those components.

What Azure Spring Apps manages for you

• Spring Cloud Config Server: Azure Spring Apps provisions and manages Config Server backed by a Git repository — which means your Spring Boot services pull configuration from a central Git repo without you deploying a Config Server pod
• Eureka Service Registry: Spring Boot services register and discover each other through a managed Eureka instance; you configure your application.properties with the registry URL and Azure handles the rest
• Distributed tracing: built-in Application Insights integration collects traces from every service without manual SDK configuration

Deploying a Spring Boot application

• Package the Spring Boot app as a JAR; deploy with the Azure CLI: az spring app deploy --name my-service --artifact-path target/app.jar; or use the Azure Spring Apps Maven plugin: mvn azure-spring-apps:deploy
• Configure environment variables and connection strings in the Azure portal or CLI — these override application.properties values; keep database URLs and passwords in Azure Key Vault, referenced via the Spring Cloud Azure Key Vault starter

Scaling and monitoring

• Azure Spring Apps scales horizontally by setting the instance count per service — az spring app scale --name my-service --instance-count 5; it distributes instances across Availability Zones automatically
• Application Insights is the default monitoring integration — it collects HTTP request metrics, latency distributions, dependency traces, and exceptions without any SDK changes in your application

Use Azure Spring Apps when: you're already committed to Spring Cloud patterns, want managed Config Server and Eureka, and don't need custom Kubernetes capabilities. Use AKS when you need full Kubernetes control.