See how the magic of VMware Tanzu is being extended to enterprise Java developers.

At this year’s Devnexus event, one of the largest annual gatherings of Java developers, AI was front and center—as is the case with most tech conferences these days. We heard many attendees talking about how quickly coding assistants have improved in just a few months, and about the hastening of adoption cycles to embrace the latest innovations that impact the SDLC—including agentic workflows, prompt engineering, the evolution of MCP—and the related governance apocalypse that will surely follow. 

More than great code – Spring applications beyond production 

With AI at the center of the event’s zeitgeist, the Spring and Tanzu teams at Broadcom led some fascinating conversations with Java developers about how AI is affecting their work today. In their session “The Modern Spring Workflow: Enterprise-Ready Delivery and AI-Boosted Coding with Tanzu,” Chris Sterling and Cora Iberkleid talked through some of the most important considerations plaguing enterprise Java developers as they work to release modern applications safely and at scale.   

Getting Spring applications into production and running reliably requires more than writing great code. Security, compliance, upgrades, and performance are all considerations when going from idea to code to enterprise-ready delivery.

VMware Tanzu Platform helps streamline that entire workflow for teams building modern Spring applications.

For example, Tanzu Platform application onboarding and assessment helps automate Spring Boot upgrades while integrating smoothly with modern AI-assisted development tools. Meanwhile, Tanzu GenAI Service enables secure, self-service access to approved large language models, while Tanzu Spring Extensions help enforce consistent operational guardrails across development teams. We’ve also extended the buildpack model to help with AI; the Tanzu Java Buildpack optimizes Spring applications for faster startup times and more efficient memory usage.

The modern Spring workflow: Unlock enterprise-ready delivery and AI-boosted coding

In their Animal Rescue demo, Cora and Chris showcase how to deploy cutting-edge features with industrial-strength security baked in so developers can use AI to do everything from using coding assistants to adding AI capabilities to existing applications without sacrificing security for innovation.

In the demo, Chris and Cora take a standard Spring application and supercharge it by adding new features:

• Generative AI chat – A new chat server Spring Boot app handles interactions with GenAI services and back-end APIs, complete with UI integration and API versioning
• Intelligent traffic control – Implementing smart, edge-level rate limits protects expensive AI chat operations and API endpoints from denial-of-service attacks, ensuring a stable experience for all users

The real value: Enterprise-grade security and resilience

In one of the most compelling and powerful parts of the demo, Chris and Cora do a deep dive on the nine critical security capabilities that often get missed in modern, cloud native workflows:

• Zero-trust networking – All services are deployed with .apps.internal routes—completely inaccessible from the public internet—and inter-service communication is governed by explicit container-to-container network policies. This eliminates attack surfaces like CORS misconfiguration vulnerabilities.
• Centralized authentication – Authentication is centralized at the gateway using OAuth2/SSO integration with UAA. The app inherits your organization’s identity provider (LDAP, SAML, OIDC) without any code changes. Application code never stores or manages credentials.
• Secure identity forwarding – Back-end services don’t even need to process JWTs. Instead, the gateway extracts user identity and injects it as trusted HTTP headers, simplifying the security model and reducing the attack surface on your microservices.
• Resilience and compliance – We demonstrate platform-managed credentials via service bindings, ensuring sensitive API keys are protected and rotated by the platform’s credential store instead of living in config files. Plus, Circuit Breaker Protection creates graceful failovers, redirecting users to a fallback page instead of raw errors if an app becomes unhealthy.

But don’t take my word for it. See for yourselves: 

Want more? Here are some of my favorite current resources about Java, Spring, AI, and MCP:
[Video Playlist] Devnexus 2026
[Demo] Production-Worthy AI with Spring AI, MCP, and Spring Security
[Webinar] Extend Your Existing APIs for Agentic Workflows with Spring HATEOAS
[Blog] Building an Enterprise MCP Server Marketplace with Tanzu Platform[Case Srudy] How Broadcom’s IT Leverages Tanzu Platform to Achieve Enterprise-Scale Agentic Business Transformation