This article will explain in depth how to tackle issues related to database compatibility and the deployment process. We will present what can happen with your production applications if you try to perform such a deployment unprepared. We will then walk through the steps in the lifecycle of an application that are necessary to have zero downtime. The result of our operations will be applying a backward incompatible database change in a backward compatible way.

If you want to work through the code samples below, you will find everything you need in GitHub.

Introduction

Zero downtime deployment

What is this mythical zero downtime deployment? You can say that your application is deployed that way if you can successfully introduce a new version of your application to production without making the user see that the application went down in the meantime. From the user’s and the company’s point of view it’s the best possible scenario of deployment since new features can be introduced…

It's my pleasure to announce the release of Spring REST Docs 1.1.0.RELEASE which is now available for Maven Central, JCenter and our release repository.

Highlights

REST Assured

As an alternative to the lightweight server-less documentation generation offered by Spring Framework's MockMvc, you can now use REST Assured to test and document your RESTful services. This opens up Spring REST Docs to all four corners of the JVM and beyond, allowing you to document anything that you can access via HTTP.

The samples now include an app that is documented using REST Docs, built using Grails, and tested using Spock. A third-party sample that uses REST Docs to document an API implemented using Ratpack is also available. My thanks to Jenn Strater…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This last week was a bit crazy, though after a long restful weekend there's a lot of intersting content to invigorate us for the week ahead. I'll be speaking at a meetup on the 16th June, for those near Amsterdam that'd care to join us! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get into it.

• Remember, the goal of microservices is, ultimately, to go faster and to get to production. To do continuous delivery. A huge part of that has to be moving code from integration and testing to production, automatically, and ideally with no downtime. I'd recommend this excellent blog by Spring Cloud team member Marcin Grzejszczak on zero-dotime deployments with a database. This is an excellent resource!
• speaking of micrservices and Spring, there's a neat introduction to doing microservices "Spring Boot way" (is there any other way? :D) on DZone by Santosh Singh
• want to learn more about Kotlin and Spring? Want to see why large organizations (like Netflix) are using Spring Cloud along with Kotlin? check our Spring team member Sébastien Deleuze's spring-kotlin…

We’re pleased to announce a release of Spring Statemachine 1.1.0. I'd like to start by saying thank you for all who contributed in any way to make this happen. Artifacts are available either from Maven Central or from Spring Repository.

What we got into this release(compared to 1.0.x):

• Comprehensive support for Spring Security.
• Context integration with `@WithStateMachine' has been greatly enhanced.
• StateContext is now a first class citizen with how user can interact with a State Machine.
• Features around persistence has been enhanced with a build-in support for redis.
• New feature helping with persist operations.
• Configuration model classes are now a public API.
• New features in timer based events.
• New Junction pseudostate.
• New Exit Point and Entry Point pseudostates.
• Configuration model verifier.
• New samples.
• UI modeling support using Eclipse Papyrus.
…

Welcome to another installation of This Week in Spring! This week's already off to a crazy start. Sunday evening I returned from Kiev, Ukraine, where I spoke at JEEConf. Yesterday, Monday, I gave a talk with my friend Baruch from JFrog at yesterday's JFrog Swampup conference event in Napa, California. Today I'm off to Denver, Colorado for Gluecon, and then off to GOTO Chicago in Chicago, Illinois and I'll finish out the week in Washington DC for customer visits. I can't wait to see you all along the way!

• I hope you'll register for this upcoming webinar on distributed tracing with the Spring Cloud team's very own Adrian Cole and Marcin Grzejszczak
• Wow! Spring Roo 2.0M2 is packed with lots of cool looking features supporting Spring Boot and removing the older ActiveRecord-style support in favor of proper Spring Data repositories
• I really liked Stormpath founder and CTO Les Hazlewood's post on how they moved their entire backend API to Spring Boot in a matter of three weeks while embracing Spring Boot's autoconfiguration to solve a few problems of their own, like a Samza auto-configuration.
• the Udemy Spring Cloud workshop online looks pretty cool…

I'm delighted to announce that Spring REST Docs 1.0.2.RELEASE is available from Maven Central, JCenter, and our release repository. My thanks to everyone who contributed to this release by reporting bugs and opening pull requests.

This maintenance release includes a number of bug fixes and an immediate upgrade is recommended for all Spring REST Docs users.

Project Page | GitHub | Issues | Documentation

Speakers: Adrian Cole & Marcin Grzejszczak, Pivotal

Latency analysis is the act of blaming components for causing user perceptible delay. In today's world of microservices, this can be tricky as requests can fan out across polyglot components and even data-centers. In many cases, the root source of latency isn't a component, but rather a link between components. This session will overview how to debug latency problems, using call graphs created by Zipkin. We'll use trace zipkin itself, setting up from scratch using docker.

While we're at it, we'll discuss how the model works, and how to safely…

On behalf on the Spring Roo team at DISID Corporation, I'm pleased to announce that Spring Roo 2.0.0.M2 has been released!

The main goal of this Spring Roo version was to update code generation to use latest Spring technologies:

• Use Spring IO Platform to manage dependency versions and be able to use latest Spring technologies.
• Update code generation to use the latest Spring framework versions (4.x)
• Update code generation to include Spring Boot on generated projects.
• Remove all generated configuration based on XML files and use Spring Boot auto-configuration.
• Remove Active Record data model in favor of the Repository (Spring Data) based one.
• Generate application architecture based on service layer pattern by default
…

Speakers: Mark Fisher & Mark Pollack, Pivotal The future of scalable data processing is microservices! Building on the ease of development and deployment provided by Spring Boot and the cloud native capabilities of Spring Cloud, the Spring Cloud Stream and Spring Cloud Task projects provide a simple and powerful framework for microservice stream and batch processing. At a higher level of abstraction, Spring Cloud Data Flow is an integrated orchestration layer that provides a highly productive experience for deploying and managing sophisticated data pipelines consisting of standalone…