Hi Spring fans and welcome to another installment of Spring Tips! This is a super exciting week! Spring Boot 2.0 is coming! Keep your eyes on the Spring Initializr or you'll miss it! :D

Today I was at the Okta Iterate conference talking to developers who are using Spring and Okta, thanks to my buddy Matt Raible. High point? I got to meet Jeff Atwood, the co-creator of Stack Overflow!

Tomorrow, I begin a whirlwind tour over the next two weeks. First, it's off to Glasgow, Scotland; then Sydney, Australia; then Dubai; then Bangalore, India (for Agile India 2018); and then it's off to Boston, Massachusetts for the SpringOne Tour event on March 13th. If you're in any of those places, don't hesitate to reach out! I'm elated to see and hear from you!

• I love this blog introducing Project Riff - the function-as-a-service from Pivotal.
• Spring Cloud Stream lead Oleg Zhurakousky just announced Spring Cloud Stream Elhurst RC1 and 2.0.0.RC1. The new release brings in a whole slew of features (pollable consumers, @StreamListener message conversion configuration, and much more) and several enhancements (optionally supports Spring WebFlux or Servlet-based autoconfiguration, more approachable arrangement of options on the Spring Initializr, and a saner default for logging).
• Spring Security ninja Joe Grandja has just announced Spring Security 2.3.0.RC1 which adds new support for Elliptic Curve signature verification in JwkTokenStore. This release also includes a few minor enhancements and bug fixes.
• Want to learn more about using Spring Cloud Contract with Kotlin, check out the issue that started it all. Presently, Spring Cloud Kotlin definitions are authored in Groovy. This new DSL grows the audience. This is a nice addition to the recent support for Spring Cloud Contract and .yml properties.
• Spring Integration ninja Artem Bilan has a nice post on the latest release, 5.0.2, of Spring Integration which now supports Micrometer-metrics publication, an updated UnicastReceivingChannelAdapter, support for the IntegrationGraphController, and dynamic filter configuration on MessageChannels. Check it out!
• Spring Boot legend Andy Wilkinson has just announced Spring Boot 2.0.0.RC2. This is the last release before the VERY imminent 2.0.GA release. Get the bits and try it out now! Or.. just wait a matter of hours or days and you'll be able to use Spring Boot 2.0.GA
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch has just announced Spring Security 5.0.2), complete with bug fixes aplenty
• Spring Data ninja and Spring Vault lead Mark Paluch just announced Spring Vault 2.0.GA. The release upgrades to Java 8 and Spring Framework 5, reactive support, improved null-safety by providing JSR-305 annotated API, Vault repository support through Spring Data KeyValue repositories, Kubernetes / AWS ECS/IAM authentication, RoleId/SecretId unwrapping for AppId authentication, Spring Security integration with VaultBytesEncryptor and VaultRandomBytesKeyGenerator and more!
• Matt Raible updated his screencast on how to get started with Spring Boot, SAML, and @okta. As he says: "Thanks to @SpringSecurity's SAML DSL project, you can do it in minutes!"
• Make sure you check out the early acess builds to Java 11
• Spring Cloud Finchley.M7 has been released. This new release sees enhancements to Spring Cloud Gateway, Feign gets a top level project and more.
• This is an interesting thread from Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke: too much focus on distribution and not on decentralization. Might be worth watching this thread for replies.
• We'd love your feedback on Cloud Foundry distributions
• The SpringOne Tour is stopping in Boston, MA March 13 and 14. Do not miss it!
• Check out the latest features in the latest release of Spring Tool Suite 4
• Check out this InfoQ review of the AxonDB event store. It works perfectly with Axon, a

Spring-based framework supporting CQRS

• Our short-awards nominated podcast, The Moment, is now available on Spotify
• Check out this quick-read slidedeck on the value of Spring Cloud Contract
• It's a bummer to see Spring legend Vinicius Carvalho depart for other horizons, but we wish him luck!
• Zipkin 2.5 - which supports distributed tracing - looks awesome! Zipkin 2.5 formalizes the tag "http.route", used for metrics correlation and span naming conventions. It also presents zipkin-gcp (formerly known as stackdriver-zipkin) for continued progress towards Google Cloud Platform. Finally, it includes a number of updates you may not have noticed!
• The SpringCon.Tech conference, in amazing New Orleans, has extended their CFP. Submit now!
• Keyhole Software's Billy Korando has a nice post on what's new in JUnit 5
• The new Spring Cloud Stream 2.0 release includes a complete revamp of content-type negotiation for the channel-based binders to address performance, flexibility and most importantly consistency. This blog by Oleg Zhurakousky has the details.
• Mark Heckler does a great job introducing Spring Cloud Services for Spring developers
• #CloudFoundry Day at #KubeCon + #CloudNativeCon is an educational event designed for the best minds of the cloud-native world. Join us May 1 to learn about the platform, connect with local end users and engineers, and exchange knowledge.
• Check out this Baeldung blog on feature flags with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud
• This is interesting: Open Policy Agent now has support for the Spring Security AccessDecisionVoter
• Want to use Spring Cloud services from .NET?
• Some good advice on architecture from Arun Gupta and Matt Stine
• Check out how to use health check endpoints with Cloud Foundry's Diego
• I wrote a little thing about how to use project Reactor and Spring to build reactive applications for the Java Magazine
• This is super exciting: a Spring Cloud Contract definition written in Kotlin! (Coming soon!)
• Not a lot about Spring in this one, but it's a very useful article on various command line tools that are useful for developers
• the Java Code Geeks blog has a nice post on messaging with RabbitMQ and Spring Boot
• A good introduction to method constraints with the bean validation 2.0 API
• The SivaLabs blog has a nice post on why Spring Boot is so popular - worth a read if you're not already convinced it's worth learning
• Software engineering daily podcast on cloudfoundry
• I'm honored to have been included in this list of most influential folks in cloud. Lots of good people in that list, besides yours truly!
• Pivotal Cloud Foundry legend Mike Dalessio was a recent guest on the Software Daily podcast. It's a great listen!
• https://twitter.com/springcloud/status/966351370340257792
• Join me in welcoming Josh Cummings to the Spring team
• The Riff project has just announced Riff 0.0.4. Riff is a function-as-a-service offering from Pivotal that runs on top of Kubernetes.
• The Asimo Tech blog has a nice post on using a microservices Sidecar pattern implementation using Postgres, Spring Cloud Netflix and Docker
• Micrometer 1.0 is now GA!
• This post introduces TLS from Gorouter to app containers in Cloud Foundry