Microsoft and Pivotal launched a private preview of their Azure Spring Cloud platform that uses Kubernetes to make it easier to deploy and operate Spring Cloud applications and microservices on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. The new platform also marks the latest Java-focused push by Microsoft.

The Azure Spring Cloud platform is designed to abstract away infrastructure management and Spring Cloud middleware management to Azure. It includes Spring Cloud, which provides the tools and framework to run Spring Boot apps in the cloud; kpack resource controllers for Kubernetes that automates the creation and updating of container images from source code; and Microsoft’s fully-managed Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

The AKS management supports hosting multiple applications or microservices that can access a common Spring Cloud service registry, configuration server, and circuit-breaker dashboard. Embedded monitoring handles the aggregation of logs, metrics, and distributed application traces into Azure Monitor that allows for a visualized management of application performance.

Spring Cloud itself was developed to provide tools that allow Java developers to build some common patterns in distributed systems. These include configuration management, service discovery, circuit breakers, and intelligent routing. This basically lets those developers re-use “boiler plate patterns” to more quickly stand up services and applications that use those patterns.

Azure Spring Cloud users can also tie their applications into existing Azure services, including Cosmos DB, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure Cache for Redis.

Once commercially launched, the companies said the service would be available on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The platform launch also further tightens Microsoft to the Java community. The computing giant earlier this year acquired London-based jClarity in a move to bolster support of the Java programming language for workloads running in its Azure cloud platform.

“At Microsoft, we strongly believe that we can do more for our customers by working alongside the Java community,” explained John Montgomery, corporate VP of program management for developer tools and services at Microsoft, in a blog post on the deal.

Montgomery explained that Microsoft uses Java for its Azure HDInsight and the game Minecraft. He also noted that many of Microsoft’s Azure customers have brought their Java production workloads to the cloud platform. “With more than half of compute workloads running on Linux, Azure has become a great platform for open source and that certainly includes Java,” Montgomery added.

Pivotal, for its part, was recently acquired by sister company VMware for $2.7 billion. Both companies are owned by Dell Technologies. The move provides VMware with a complete Kubernetes stack that has become increasingly important for enterprise customers looking to operate their applications in a multi-cloud environment.

“Together, both companies have an improved ability to attack the market and become more direct competitors not only to Kubernetes platform offerings (like OpenShift from IBM/Red Hat) but the major cloud providers who are attempting to attack the same market via offerings such as Anthos or Fargate,” noted Redmonk Analyst Rachel Stephens in a blog post on the deal.