News

Spring Cloud Azure 5.0 Ships with Updated, Redesigned Documentation

• By David Ramel
• 01/25/2023

The dev team behind the newly generally available Spring Cloud Azure 5.0 noted updated and redesigned documentation as a highlight of the release.

Spring Cloud Azure is an open source project from VMware in cooperation with Microsoft that provides seamless Spring integration with Azure services, giving developers a Spring-idiomatic way to connect and consume Azure services by using only a few lines of configuration, requiring minimal code changes. The Spring Framework is an application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform from VMware/Pivotal Software.

In listing highlights of the new release, the team called out enhanced support for passwordless connections for Azure Services, with last December's Spring Cloud Azure 4.5 being the first stable version to support passwordless connections to Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, as detailed in the Visual Studio Magazine article, "Spring Cloud Azure 4.5 Furthers Microsoft's 'Passwordless' Push."

Several more Azure services now support passwordless connections, including Azure SQL Database, Event Hubs -- Kafka, and Storage.

This initiative is part of a years-long push for passwordless connections on the part of Microsoft, which in 2021 said: "Nobody likes passwords. They're inconvenient. They're a prime target for attacks. Yet for years they've been the most important layer of security for everything in our digital lives -- from email to bank accounts, shopping carts to video games."

The team explained more in a Jan. 25 announcement post for v5.0. "Using username/password credentials to access one application from another significantly increases overall risk profile," it said. "An unauthorized user can gain access to the application using a connection string accidentally checked into source control, sent through an insecure email, pasted into the wrong chat, or otherwise illegitimately obtained. Updating your application to use passwordless connections provides dramatically improved security. Passwordless connections for Java applications to Azure databases and eventing services are generally available with Spring Cloud Azure 5.0, enabling you to access services securely without passing usernames and passwords over the wire."

Another highlight of the release is improved documentation, which has been both updated and redesigned for multiple properties.

"Good documentation is a key part of Spring Cloud Azure," Microsoft said. "We've created a new online resource, Azure for Spring developers [see graphic above], to help Spring developers code, deploy, and scale their Spring applications on Azure. Whether developers are familiar with Spring and unfamiliar with Azure Service or the other way around -- or new to both! -- they can come to this site to learn. Content will be expanded and updated continuously."

The team also redesigned the Spring Cloud Azure documentation to help developers more easily find what they need, combined with useful scenarios. It's shown in the graphic above

Also, in the new v5.0 release, the Azure Support module in Spring Initializr now supports Spring Boot 3, with the team saying the effect of this is that developers can begin their Spring Cloud Azure 5.0 journey directly from the Initializr.

Microsoft noted that the new release is compatible with Spring Boot 3 and Spring Cloud 2022.0.0 and also listed many other changes and tweaks in the announcement post.