Spring Cloud Azure value proposition

[chenrujun]

What value does Spring Cloud Azure (SPA) bring to customer?

Dependency management

• Without SCA, customer need to find the relationship between spring-boot version and kinds of Azure SDK version.
• With SCA, customer just add dependency of spring-cloud-azure-starter-xxx and spring-cloud-azure-dependencies. No need to concern about the Azure SDK's version problem.

Auto configure Azure ADK client

• Without SCA, customer need to learn AzureXxxClientBuilder to build a AzureXxxClient.
• With SCA, customer can get AzureXxxClient by adding dependency of spring-cloud-azure-starter-xxx. AzureXxxClient can be configured in application.yml.

Migrate to Azure resources easily

Take spring-cloud-stream as an example. If a customer is using spring-cloud-starter-stream-kafka, now he wants to use Azure Event Hubs instead of Kakfa.

• Without SCA, he needs much time to learn how to use Event Hubs SDK in spring-cloud-stream.
• With SCA, he can use spring-cloud-azure-starter-stream-event-hubs. No need to concert about Event Hubs SDK upgrade / spring-cloud-stream-binder implementation.

Use Azure resource with minimal configuration

Take Azure AD as an example

• With SCA, customer need much effort to learn spring-security framework to support login by Azure AD school/work account.
• With SCA, customer just need add minimal items in application.yml after adding dependency of spring-cloud-azure-starter-active-directory.