Tested and Verified Spring Boot 3 for Red Hat platforms

The product team behind Red Hat support for Spring Boot has designed a new offering that lets customers use the community version of Spring Boot 3 without replacing the individual components with Red Hat supported components. Instead of providing Red Hat components for Spring Boot, the team will focus on testing and verifying community Spring Boot on Red Hat platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This means that customers can feel safe knowing that Spring Boot 3 has been tested and verified with a combination of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The exact details of which combinations will be tested and verified will be published together with the first release of tested and verified Spring Boot 3. We aim to fully announce this approximately 2 months before the Red Hat support for Spring Boot 2.7 is ended[1]. Still, customers can start migrating their code to the latest Spring Boot 3 version immediately.

Background why we are changing the offering around Spring Boot

Red Hat’s commitment to supporting our customers is very high, and to properly ensure that we can support our customers, Red Hat redistributes artifacts and binaries for open-source projects that we support. This enables us to fix bugs and CVE issues quickly and not wait for an upstream community to implement a fix. This is why many middleware-based products are pre-fixed with “Red Hat build of”, a reflection of the fact that Red Hat is building and shipping an upstream project/component. This has not been the case with Spring Boot since the Spring community is maintained by VMware Tanzu[2], and VMware makes the decisions around roadmaps, life cycles[3], etc. Also, since Spring® is a registered trademark, Red Hat’s capabilities to redistribute a version of Spring Boot is limited.

Before Spring Boot 3, Red Hat offered support for Spring Boot 1 & 2, which was a reasonable compromise between fully supported components and community components with limited support. To get full support, developers had to replace community components with Red Hat-provided versions. However, most customers did not replace the community components, resulting in their application being non-compliant and, therefore not supported by Red Hat. We believe this new offering will better reflect how our customers use Spring Boot. This is also how most other vendors support Spring Boot as well.

Frequently asked questions

How do I access tested and verified Spring Boot 3?

Any customer with a valid subscription to Red Hat Runtimes or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform will automatically get entitlement to tested and verified Spring Boot 3, as a developer, I can continue to use the community version of Spring Boot, and as a customer, I can open tickets and get help with issues. Red Hat does not offer a distribution of Spring Boot; as a customer, you would download the artifacts from normal Maven repositories, like Maven Central.

Will Red Hat offer support for Spring Boot 3 on other platforms?

No, Testing and verification of Spring Boot 3 will only be executed on Red Hat Platforms, and Red Hat will not offer support for other platforms. See Tested and Verified Spring Boot 3 configurations

Will I, as a customer using Spring Boot 3 on a Red Hat platform, be able to open a support ticket?

Yes, customers can open Support tickets, and Red Hat will answer questions and help with root cause analysis, workarounds, etc. However, Red Hat will not offer bug fixes or security updates for Spring Boot.

This is not enough for our organization, we want to have the same level of support that other Red Hat products offer. What are our options?

Red Hat build of Quarkus can be used for similar use-cases as Spring Boot, and it includes Spring compatibility extensions so that developers can use the same APIs in Quarkus as they were using Spring Boot. Red Hat fully supports the Red Hat build of Quarkus and is also included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Red Hat build of Quarkus can also be purchased for usage on other non-Red Hat platforms.

My Spring Boot app runs on Red Hat OpenJDK and OpenShift. What can I expect regarding support for my app?

Red Hat will help you with issues, and if the issue turns out to be related to the JVM (OpenJDK) or somewhere in the OpenShift platform, you are still covered under normal support. If the cause of the issue turns out to be from Spring Boot, the issue will have to be reported to the Spring Boot community. See Community Support for Spring Boot 3

What life cycle can I expect for different versions of Spring Boot?

Since Red Hat is not shipping a distribution of Spring Boot, we follow the life cycle defined in the Spring Community. Red Hat will test and verify all currently OSS supported versions as specified here[3].

Footnotes

[1] Red Hat support for Spring Boot - Support life cycle
[2] https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot
[3] Spring Boot community life-cycle