Hi Spring fans! This week I'm in Redmond, hanging out with our friends and Pivotal partner Microsoft talking about Cloud Foundry on Microsoft Azure. As you may know, Microsoft's Azure IaaS platform is the #2 most widely used cloud and it's growing! It's got more datacenters than the other two cloud vendors in more regions (including in Germany and China!) and a huge raft of services that support both Windows and Linux operating systems. There's so much exciting stuff coming up including Azure Stack, which runs Azure on-premise, and the amazing integration between Azure and PCF. I'm looking forward to hearing even more about Microsoft Azure this week at CF Summit in Santa Clara, which is where I'll be on Wednesday and then it's off to Utah for the Utah JUG. Come out, join me, and say hi!

• the Baeldung has a nice look at starting an application with Spring Boot
• there's some amazingly cool stuff happening on Microsoft Azure and it works particularly well with Spring and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Learn more here with that free whitepaper.
• Spring 5 has a lot of major features and a lot of smaller, but very convenient, features. One of them is the newly introduced support for the @Nullable annotation which feeds into your compiler and IDE feedback for method invocations
• the Auth0 blog has a nice post on scaling JSF applications using Spring Session
• community legend Michael Simons makes a great point in this tweet: if you want to understand what Spring Data repositories are all about, check out Eric Evans' Domain Driven Design book!
• Spring Boot legend Stéphane Nicoll has just announced Spring Boot 1.5.4
• Spring Integration ninja Artem Bilan has just announced Spring Integration 4.3.10 which includes improvements in JSON serialization, improved error handling, and more
• not one to rest on his laurels, Artem also announced Spring AMQP 1.6.10 and 1.7.3
• Artem also announced Spring for Apache Kafka 1.2.2 and 1.1.6
• Spring Security lead Rob Winch just announced a fix for CVE-2017-4995 - update immediately!
• Spring Data ninja Mark Paluch just announced Spring Data Ingalls SR4 and Hopper SR11 - packed with new features and updated releases!
• Stéphane Nicoll also announced Spring Framework 4.3.9
• Marcin Grzejszczak just announced Spring Cloud Pipelines 1.0.0.M5