Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Stockholm, Sweden, for the epic (and snowy) JFokus event, then it's off to Frankfurt, Germany for the OOP show. If you're at either event, don't hesitate to reach out and say hi on Twitter (@starbuxman)!

• Spring Cloud Skipper 1.0.GA is here! A cross-cloud (Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes) option for continuous delivery/updating/rollback/query of Spring Boot-based applications. Spring Cloud Skipper underpins the recently added support in Spring Cloud Data Flow for versioning and rolling back stream definitions, but it's also useful in its own right.
• Spring Cloud Stream lead Oleg Zhurakousky just announced Spring Cloud Stream Elmhurst.M4 /2.0.0.M4 Release . The new release includes performance improvements around content-type resolution, Introduction of Polling Source as an alternative to the event-driven message consumption, StreamListener infrastructure enhancements to primarily deal with multiple destination, continuing documentation improvements, various other enhancements and bug fixes, and more.
• Pivotal Web Services (PWS) is Pivotal's hosted, multi-tenant version of Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry is based on BOSH which makes easy, centralized upgrades and deployments of new releases as easy as possible. This post looks at the timeline for deploying a new release of the Ubuntu "stemcell" that underpins all running Linux-based applications on PWS after the Spectrum/Meltdown exploit hit. It took less than an hour of engineer time to update the root image, and about 16 hours to see the entire platform updated with rolling deploys, automatically, after deploying the updated stemcell change. During this time, service was not disrupted for any of the countless applications deployed to the platform.
• Check out the new features in the latest release of Spring Tool Suite 4
• Sabby Anandan has a nice post on all the new features in the just-released

Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.3 supporting continuous delivery, functions and improved usability, among other things

• Wondering what happened to the Spring Social auto-configuration in Spring Boot? They've been extracted into Spring Social proper! For more, check out this Github issue
• Spring IO Platform lead Andy Wilkinson has just announced Spring IO Platform "Brussels" SR7 which upgrades the versions of a number of the projects in the Platform including Spring AMQP 1.7.6, Spring Boot 1.5.10, Spring Data Ingalls-SR10, Spring Framework 4.3.14, Spring Integration 4.3.14, Spring Retry 1.2.2, Spring Security 4.2.4, and Spring Web Flow 2.4.7.
• Spring Boot lead Phil Webb has just announced Spring Boot 1.5.10. This release includes an important fix for security vulnerability CVE-2018-1196, which can affect anyone using Spring Boot’s systemd and init.d service support. It also provides the latest version of Spring Security which fixed CVE-2018-1199. In addition the security fix, Spring Boot 1.5.10 includes over 55 fixes, improvements and dependency updates.
• Speaking of Spring Cloud Skipper, if you want to learn more about it from the source, check out this great talk from Dr. Pollack speaking at SpringOne Platform 2017
• This is yet another great post from Project Reactor team member Simon Basle wherein he looks at how to combine the MDC feature of logging libraries with Reactor's own Context feature.
• This is an oldie-but-a-goodie: check out this post on InfoQ from Victor Grazi on building REST-based microservices with Spring Boot
• What's new in RabbitMQ 3.7? Lots! Read on.
• Good news everybody! Aliyun now has support for natively deploying Spring Cloud applications. Aliyun is an Alibaba company that provides its own infrastructure-as-a-service that mostly serves Chinese businesses. This Chinese-language post explains everything.
• It is pretty cool that the free sample of the book that my friend Kenny Bastani and I worked on, Cloud Native Java, was the #1 most popular / downloaded eBook asset from Pivotal in 2017.
• This is a pretty cool example of passwordless authentication with Spring Security. The idea is simple but the code sophisticated: you enter an email or a username, the system emails you, and then you click on the email to be logged in.
• Check out the Cloud Foundry Day on February 20th, hosted by IBM, colocated with IBM's Index Conference
• Community legend Aboullaite Mohammed has put together a great post on tracking real-time aircraft status with reactive support from Project Reactor, Spring Framework 5, Spring Boot 2.0, Spring Data Kay, and Spring Web Flux. Nice job!
• This is an interesting, if brief, look at 'profiling' Spring Boot-based applications. It's definitely a good first step..
• Check out the latest Oracle Java Magazine installment. You'll find content on all the latest-and-greatest reactive technologies (Vert.x, RxJava 2, Reactor) including an article by yours truly on using Spring Boot 2.0, Project Reactor, Spring Data Kay and so much more.
• Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.3.GA has been released! The new release includes stream updates and rollbacks, a Java DSL, and an improved Angular-based UI.
• This episode of Pivotal Insights, with hosts Dormain Drewitz and Jeff Kelly, is a discussion with Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke on refactoring from monoliths to microservices. It was the #1 most listened to/most popular episode from 2017 and is a recommended listen!
• I liked this Baeldung blog installment on using Spring Cloud "App Starters" to connect Twitter to Hadoop
• Tomasz Nurkiewicz has a nice post on consuming server-sent events using the reactive Spring Framework 5 WebClient
• I like this post on using Spring Data Couchbase on the Couchbase blog
• Project Riff and Spring Cloud Function leads Mark Fisher and Dr. Dave Syer look at serverless Spring in this epic SpringOne Platform 2017 talk that's now available on InfoQ
• I recently appeared on the Pivotal Insights podcasts talking about all things cloud native: check it out!
• Check out all these JUnit 5 Jupiter-compatible extensions
• Spring Boot 2.0 RC1 is here! The new release is packed with all sorts of great features including a module to help with legacy property migration,

HTTP/2 support for Jetty (to go along with the Tomcat and Undertow that was added in M7), Greatly enhanced GSON support (thanks to an external contribution), Improved actuator JSON structures, helpful security matchers for both Servlet and Reactive deployements, and much more. It also picks up 57 issues that were closed for the recent 1.5.10 release, including an important fix for security vulnerability CVE-2018-1196. This release is huge and it begins the journey towards a final release! Get the bits, kick the tires, NOW!

• This is an interesting article on InfoQ: why and how databasese should be included in the deployment pipeline
• The roundup for the next Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 event in April looks pretty good! I'm excited to see, among all the usual suspects, new faces like Kelsey Hightower