Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another wild-and-wacky week of This Week in Spring! I'm in Johannesburg, South Africa where I both spoke at the SpringOne Tour South Africa event and at the Johannesburg Java User Group. Had tons of fun on safari visiting (from the safety of a good deal of distance and an SUV) the utterly astonishing and beautiful - majestic - wildlife here. I can't stress that last part enough. The animals here are so, so, SO breathtaking. I got as close as I ever want to get to an elephant that was like a small house with eyes. Utterly massive! It towered over buses. When you go into the bush, my tour guide warned, you enter the food chain, and there, we don't figure very high at all. The experience reminded me how insignificant I am and how utterly privileged I am to be here, with you, dear community. We're all pretty lucky.

I also really enjoyed meeting some of the local community. My friend, Rory Preddy at Microsoft South Africa, was telling me that the local community here in South Africa is very small - tens of thousands of professional developers, if that. What the community lacks in quantity they more than made up for, it eems, in quality.

What an amazing inspiring few days it's been! Tomorrow, I'm off to Mauritius for the MSCC and then back in South Africa on Friday for the SpringOne Tour Capetown event. This figures to be fun!

• In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast I spoke Microsoft's Kylie Liang and Theresa Nguyen on MIcrosoft's Java and Spring Support. This was a really interesting discussion for me. Azure is getting better and better and even though I try there's something about which I'm unaware. I'm grateful Kylie and Theresa were able to sit down and educate me.
• In yet another unplanned installment of Spring Tips, I debut WebMvc.fn - the functional DSL for Spring MVC. Trust me, you'll want to see this!
• Spring IO Platform Cairo-SR8
• Spring IO Platform Brussels-SR17
• Spring Boot 2.1.4 released
• Spring Boot 2.0.9 Released
• Spring Boot 1.5.20 available now
• Spring Security 5.1.5, 5.0.12, 4.2.12 Released
• CVE-2019-3795: Spring Security 4.2.12, 5.0.12, 5.1.5 Released
• I really enjoyed this comparison of Alibaba's Sentinel vs. Netflix's Hystrix
• This tweet [is everything to me!(https://twitter.com/springcentral/status/1115162821258559488) - congratulations Sara Torrey! :-)
• This was an intersting interview on Spring Data JDBC with Jens Schauder on the Spring Data team
• Cloud Native Buildpacks Hit Beta ? – Buildpacks – Medium
• It's pretty cool that on April 1, 2019, Spring Boot turned five years! Congrats Spring Boot! Here's to many more happy, bootiful returns!
• Check out Richard Seroter's post looking at the Spring Cloud Stream binder for Azure Event Hubs